Rebirth
by fongiel24
Summary: Commander John Shepard has a reputation for brutal efficiency and always getting the job done. But beneath the facade lies a man haunted by ghosts from his past. Who is the real John Shepard? Novelization of ME2 featuring M!Shep and Miranda as main chars.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

The waiting was the worst part. Every time the _SSV Normandy_ passed through a mass relay, he held his breath and didn't release it until they were clear on the other side. Every jump was a leap into the unknown. Technology had advanced remarkably since the discovery of Prothean ruins on Mars over thirty years ago, but there was still no detection system capable of looking through a mass relay to see what lay in wait on the other side. This last cruise had been relatively uneventful. The few geth ships they had encountered had been easily dispatched by the _Normandy_ but Commander John Shepard still couldn't shake that foreboding feeling that the worst was yet to come.

_"You're exhausted, Commander. When was the last time you had a full night's rest?"_

The statement had been phrased more as an accusation than a question. When Shepard had been unable to answer, Doctor Chakwas had given him a sympathetic squeeze on the arm, then dismissed him from duty, putting the ship under the command of Navigator Pressley.

_"If anything comes up on the scope, I want to know about it immediately."_

Shepard thought Navigator Pressley had given him his assurance a little too quickly. Like much of the crew, the monotony of the cruise had lulled Pressley into a false sense of security. Shepard suspected his attempts at keeping the crew from complacency were starting to wear thin. He might have been a Council Spectre and a war hero a dozen times over, but they were only human. After six long months of chasing the rogue Spectre Saren Arterius all over the galaxy, then facing and defeating _Sovereign_ and his geth in the horrific Battle of the Citadel, the crew of the _Normandy_ just wanted to believe it was all over. Shepard had no doubt they'd follow him to the gates of hell if he asked them, but without concrete objectives and a real enemy to fight, it was difficult even ensuring they would devote their full attention to their duties.

_Why can't I relax like everyone else? I've earned it haven't I? _

Shepard absentmindedly rubbed his hand along the side of his jaw, feeling the coarse texture of several days' growth of stubble. He couldn't even remember the last time he'd shaved.

_Because you've seen it with your own eyes. The Reapers are coming._

The _Normandy_ had a good crew. All of the men and women serving under him were among the best the Alliance had to offer. But there would be casualties. People would die and he would sit here behind this desk, writing condolence letters to the next of kin long into the night.

Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko's face, killed on Virmire in the quest to stop Saren, appeared in his mind. Casualties had been light on that cruise, the only dead being Alenko and Jenkins, but it didn't make it any easier for him to accept. He was their commanding officer, responsible for leading them into the fires of battle and bringing them out the other side. And he had failed them.

_You know that's not true. The mission always comes first. _

Shepard had long since lost count of the number of missions he had commanded since becoming an Alliance Marine, but he could remember every last man and woman he'd lost. At the Academy, they'd instilled in every Marine officer the importance of putting the safety and survival of their men above all other considerations and he'd bought wholeheartedly into that creed but since Torfan, he'd realized how naive that was. First as an N7 special forces operator, then as a Spectre, he'd been assigned missions of such gravity and importance that even the possibility of failure was unthinkable. Completing the mission was not just the most important priority - it was the only priority. If that required the sacrifice of his men, he had to do it. And he had done exactly that on more occasions than he wanted to think about.

Walking over to the liquor cabinet beside his desk, Shepard took out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and poured himself a glass. In his time as a marine, he'd traveled all across the galaxy, sampling a broad range of strange and exotic beverages, produced on a hundred different worlds. Some he had enjoyed, others not so much but in the end, he always returned to the familiar bottle with the diagonal black label. He'd first acquired a taste for it as a raw recruit on Titan and its distinctive flavour was one of the few things in his life that remained unchanging. He knew it may have sounded strange, finding stability in a bottle, but for him that kind of familiarity was comforting

Shepard tossed back his glass and poured again. He doubted Doctor Chakwas would approve when he was supposed to be catching up on sleep, but he was off-duty and there was nothing the Doctor could do about it. Shepard sighed. If he wasn't going to sleep, he might as well as catch up on some paperwork. As he sat down, he accidentally knocked a mission report he'd been reading off the desk and bent to pick it up. Grabbing the dataslate off the floor and setting it back on his desk, his eyes fell on a holopic sitting in the corner. He picked it up and let his mind wander back.

At least a dozen marines were crowded around a table, most of them already drunk or at least well on their way there. In the centre of the group, a boyish-looking lieutenant was holding a funnel over the mouth of a young female marine with one hand, pouring a bottle of scotch into the funnel with the other. It had been Private Paulson's nineteenth birthday and Major Kyle had secured offbase liberty passes for most of the platoon so they could celebrate by doing what young marines did when given time off – consume copious amounts of alcohol and cause headaches for the brass. In an attempt to minimize the damage, Kyle had sent one of his junior officers to accompany the platoon.

A smile crept over Shepard's face. _Things didn't quite work out as the old man had hoped, did they? _A completely besotted and semiconscious Staff Lieutenant John Shepard had been dragged back to base the next morning by two Alliance MPs, one of them sporting a shiny new black eye, as the rest of the platoon staggered in after him, the whole lot of them smelling like a brewery. Kyle had immediately had the entire unit thrown into the brig for the next two days to sober up.

Shepard's mood darkened. The Battle of Torfan had begun two weeks later. The final assault had won Shepard the attention of the Alliance's top brass, immediately putting his career on the fast track but it had come at a cost. Most of the marines in the holopic he held in his hand had been killed in that assault.

A wet sensation in his lap shook him from his thoughts and he realized he was pouring scotch all over himself, having missed the glass completely. He couldn't even remember beginning to pour and it bothered him. Cursing, he grabbed a t-shirt off a nearby chair to wipe up the puddle that was forming on the floor. As he got down on his knees, the _Normandy_ suddenly shook violently, throwing him off his feet and driving his head into the corner of a dresser. Red lights began flashing and a klaxon blared.

"All hands to battlestations, all hands to battlestations..."

Feeling blood dripping down his face, Shepard slowly climbed to his feet, only to be knocked down again as the _Normandy_ shuddered from another hit. The feminine voice of the ship's VI sounded over the intercom.

"Warning: Hull breach in engineering. All personnel are recommended to vacate the engineering deck immediately."

Shepard hurriedly strapped on his armour and slammed his fist against the intercom.

"Pressley, I want a sitrep! Now!"

A woman responded instead of Pressley.

"Commander this is Chief Williams, XO Pressley is KIA. We're under attack by some sort of ship Gunnery can't identify. Kinetic barriers and primary power systems are down. Joker can't release the emergency beacons."

Grabbing his helmet, Shepard linked up his suit to the ship's intercom.

"All hands, this is Commander Shepard. Abandon ship, I repeat, abandon ship!"


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

_Seven years ago_

The first impression he had of the SSV _Houston_ was how much more spacious it felt. Like all military craft, the _Houston_ was designed with other priorities besides crew comfort but the spartan metal bulkheads of the crew quarters seemed to have expanded since the heavy cruiser had dropped his unit off on Torfan. It took Staff Lieutenant John Shepard a moment to figure out exactly why that was and then it hit him.

Other than the subtle humming of the engines, the ship was deathly quiet. On the trip to Torfan, this area had been a beehive of activity, a full company of marines sharing space with the ship's crew in a space barely adequate for the ship's normal contingent. Now, other than a few crewmen wandering through the area, the crew quarters were virtually deserted. The rows of bunks the marines had set up six weeks ago as temporary sleeping arrangements were mostly unoccupied, covers made up perfectly as if awaiting inspection. Each empty bunk seemed to be a reminder of how badly the mission had gone wrong, an operation where nothing had been as planned and many good marines had paid with their lives. As he made his way past each bunk towards the small cabin that served as the officer's quarters, the face of its occupant and their name flashed through his mind.

_Nelson. Rodriguez. Sullivan. Cohen. Townsend. McClung, Paulson... _Suddenly the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation and fatigue hit him like a sniper's bullet. Staggering into his cabin, Shepard cast off his armour and fell into his bunk, almost immediately drifting off into a troubled sleep.

* * *

The Admiral set the debriefing dataslate down on his desk and took off his glasses.

"Lieutenant, I called you here to debrief me in person on what happened on Torfan."

Shepard stared directly ahead, focusing his gaze on the wall behind the Admiral, avoiding the man's steel grey eyes.

"It's all in my mission report, sir. I left nothing out," he stated coolly. He had no doubt the brass were looking for someone to blame for the debacle on Torfan. With Major Kyle still undergoing psychiatric treatment, Shepard knew exactly whose door the witchhunt would end at.

"I want to hear it from your mouth. How did you end up in command of the company? What happened to Major Kyle?"

Shepard risked a glance at the man sitting behind the desk. Even sitting down and dressed in a spotless navy-blue dress uniform, the Admiral's athletic build and imposing height were obvious. Printed in perfectly straight letters across the gleaming nameplate pinned to the Admiral's chest, he could make out the name "Cullen" but it didn't ring a bell. Shepard set his jaw and took a deep breath before beginning his report.

_Shepard ducked his head as a shell screamed in overhead. _

"_Goddamnit! The squint bastards weren't supposed to have artillery!"_

_He turned his head but his runner, Private Paulson, was cowering in the bottom of the foxhole, her face as white as a sheet. _

"_This is nothing compared to Elysium, Paulson. It'll take a lot more than this to scare us off, won't it Marine?" he tried to calm her with a courage he wasn't sure he felt. She nodded weakly and Shepard gave her a reassuring pat on the arm. _

"_This is Fox Lead to Fox Three-One, do you copy?"_

_Shepard keyed his comlink. _

"_Fox Three-One copies." _

_He could barely make out Major Kyle's voice over the channel. Since they'd landed, the batarian signal jammers had been playing hell with the comm net._

"_Shepard, keep your squad under cover! Batarian guns are dug in deep. SSV Houston is attempting to provide fire support but..."_

_A massive shell blast cut him off. Shepard looked out over the ruined landscape and his heart jumped into his mouth. The Major's command post had almost been obliterated by a direct hit from a batarian shell. _

"_Fox Lead! Fox Lead! This is Fox Three-One! Do you copy?" _

_Shepard hammered on his comlink's transmitter._

"_Respond, damnit!" _

_When he was met with only static, he slowly realized he was now the ranking officer in the company._

Admiral Cullen leaned forward in his chair, steepling his hands under his chin.

"What happened next, Lieutenant? I want to know why you chose to launch a counterattack instead of withdrawing your company."

Out of the corner of his eye, Shepard could see the Admiral pick up the debriefing dataslate again.

_Another shell slammed into the ground, just barely missing the foxhole and spraying the occupants with dust._

"_Houston this is Fox Three-One, acting commander of Fox Company. Fox Lead is down and we are under heavy enemy bombardment. Requesting immediate extraction, over."_

_The answer from the Houston came back almost immediately. _

"_That's a negative, Fox Three-One. We can't do a pickup at your location while those guns are still active. You'll need to withdraw to at least Sector Two-Zulu-Charlie." _

_Shepard called up a map display on his omnitool. _

"_Houston, that's five kilometres!" _

"_We cannot extract while your position is still under fire, Fox Three-One, you'll have to either get to Sector Two-Zulu-Charlie or hang tight until the fire stops..."_

_Not even waiting for the full response, Shepard angrily cut the link. _

"_What do we do, sir?" _

_Paulson had a look of barely-contained terror on her face. A five kilometre trek to the extraction zone. It would require them to leave their wounded and expose themselves to batarian fire from their fortifications cut into the hillside. Intelligence had advised that a head-on assault would incur unacceptable casualties but... _

"_That squint artillery isn't going to stop. If we stay here, we die, Private. If we retreat, we die. If we advance, we'll at least take a few of those SOBs with us!"_

_He keyed his comlink. _

"_This is Lieutenant Shepard to all surviving elements of Fox Company. Major Kyle has been incapacitated and the Houston cannot extract us. We either move to engage the enemy or we die in our foxholes. All squad leaders, I am executing assault plan Echo-Two-Seven. Advance on my mark!"_

Shepard looked across at the Admiral but the man's face was expressionless.

"Your company sustained over 85% casualties. D Company of 3rd Battalion, 412th Marine Brigade has effectively ceased to exist, Lieutenant. One hundred and thirty-one marines died on Torfan. With that in mind, would you have done anything differently?

_Shepard grabbed Paulson by the arm. _

"_You stay on my ass and don't stop moving! Don't stop for anything! You understand me, Private?"_

_She looked scared. All of them did. Shepard willed himself to hold his own emotions in check. They all expected the hero of the Skyllian Blitz to be fearless. If that was what it took to keep them alive, he would have to be that man. _

"_Up and at'em Marines! Follow me!" _

_Vaulting over the top of the trench, Shepard charged up the hill. A hail of batarian slugs slammed into his kinetic barriers and an alarm sounded as they overloaded. He gritted his teeth as one of the slugs got through and impacted against his armour. An antivehicle missile struck Rodriguez and exploded. The big corporal disappeared into a pink mist that splattered against Shepard's face. All around him, Marines were getting cut down, shredded by automatic weapons fire or vaporized instantly by exploding shells. But it was too late to stop. They either kept going or they would be slaughtered. _

Admiral Cullen nodded.

"One last thing, Lieutenant. In almost six weeks of fighting, your company didn't capture a single enemy prisoner. These were slavers and pirates, opportunists, not fanatics. Their kind aren't normally known for fighting to the death."

_Three out of Fox Company's four platoons had taken over eighty percent casualties. Hill 425, the last batarian stronghold on Torfan, had finally fallen. _

_A line of batarian prisoners was being herded past him into a fenced enclosure. Here they would be processed before the Alliance sent a ship to take them into captivity. Private Paulson handed him her canteen and he splashed it over his face. _

"_We finally did it, sir. We're... alive. I can't believe we did it!"_

_The young marine looked exhausted but Shepard could see hints of her childlike enthusiasm returning. Shepard smiled tiredly and handed her back the canteen. _

"_You did well back there, Paulson. I'm proud of you." _

_She flashed him that toothy grin the rest of the platoon always gave her grief for and disappeared over the hill. _

"_LT, we've got a few live ones up here. They look wounded but they'll live. I'm going to see if I can do anything for them..." _

_Shepard's blood ran cold. _

"_Amanda, wait!"_

_A shot rang out. He made it to the top of the hill just in time to see Paulson fall backwards, a look of surprise on her face as a bright red blossom of blood slowly expanded across the front of her body armour. A wounded batarian lay at her feet, a pistol in his hand, his face twisted into an ugly sneer. Shepard felt like an observer watching a holovid as his body seemed to act of its volition, drawing the long bayonet from his boot and slashing it across the batarian's throat. He grabbed Paulson, cradling her head in his arms as he screamed for a corpsman. _

"_I-I... I'm sorry... LT..."_

_Hot tears streamed down his cheeks. _

"_Hold on Marine, don't you die on me!"_

_The corpsman rushed over and pushed him aside. Checking the young marine's vitals, the corpsman shook his head. Wiping the tears from his eyes, Shepard strided over to the enclosure where the last of the batarian prisoners were being herded in. _

_One of the prisoners saw his lieutenant's insignia and laughed. _

"_How does it feel, human? We're POWs now. How long do you think the Alliance can hold us for? We'll be back out in the Terminus in less time than it took us to burn Elysium!"_

_Gritting his teeth, Shepard slammed the enclosure shut and ordered the marines guarding it to leave. _

"_You think so, do you?" _

_Climbing up on the back of a Grizzly assault vehicle, Shepard swivelled the mounted heavy machine gun around. The batarians realized what the Alliance lieutenant intended to do and began trying to claw their way out. Hammering down the twin triggers of the gun, Shepard held them down until the barrels glowed red. He knew that what he was doing would get him court martialed but he didn't care. He kept shooting long after all movement had ceased in the fenced enclosure. _

The Admiral cut him off with a wave of his hand.

" I've heard enough, Lieutenant," he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms, "You led an assault against a dug-in enemy that knew you were coming and won. Batarian raider attacks in the sector have fallen 70% since Torfan, probably thanks to you and your men. I don't know if you're brave or just crazy Lieutenant, but judging from those reports, you're lucky to be alive."

Shepard stood straight at attention, waiting for the hammer to fall.

"But you also got almost your entire unit killed and by your own admission, executed at least sixty Batarian prisoners. Based on your actions at Torfan, I would be perfectly justified in recommending you for another Star of Terra then throwing you before a court martial right after."

The Admiral finished scribbling something on his dataslate and gestured to the Marine stationed on guard just outside the door. _So he's a military prosecutor. I should have guessed._ For a moment Shepard's muscles tensed as he wondered how far he would get if he took down the guard and attempted an escape but quickly pushed the idea out of his head. _If they want to take my career, they can have it_. _If they want to take my freedom, I probably deserve it._ He would face the court martial and tell the world of the sacrifices of the Marines of Fox Company on Torfan. He would not end up lying in a pool of blood having been shot in the back like a coward during an escape attempt. _I owe the dead that much._ _I owe Amanda Paulson that much. _

"Take this message back to the captain of the _Houston_. Nobody on that ship breathes a word about what happened on Torfan."

Admiral Cullen stood up and walked around his desk. Putting his hands on his hips, he looked directly into the younger man's eyes, as if trying to read his mind. After what seemed an eternity, he nodded as if he approved and sat back down.

"I've read your file Lieutenant. Your aptitude scores and technical skills put you in the top one percent of your graduating class at the Academy. You're ambitious and idealistic and on paper, you're everything the Marine Corps wants in its junior officers. But you're raw and emotional. You let what happens out there affect you in here."

Admiral Cullen jabbed a finger in his own chest for emphasis.

"You're one ruthless SOB but you understand the stakes and you get the job done. You've got that look in your eye that tells me you'll never back down from a fight and that rare quality that makes men want to follow you. There's not a lot of Marines wired like you, Lieutenant."

The Admiral took out a cigar from a drawer in his desk and leaned back in his chair. Slicing off the tip, he lit it and puffed on it a few times.

"Sir, I led my men to their deaths and lost control of my emotions. I deserve to be court martialed."

Admiral Cullen shook his head.

"No, you led them to victory against impossible odds. Not many Marines could have done what you did on that hill that day. But I didn't call you here to justify your actions," the Admiral paused, setting his cigar down in an ash tray, "I'm going to be straight with you, son. You've got two options right now. You can walk out that door and Alliance JAG will pick you up and charge you with killing those prisoners. It's your life, if you want to be a martyr, I can't stop you. If you want the deaths of your men to mean something though, keep listening."

Pulling a file out of his desk, Admiral Cullen slid it across the desk.

"I've been looking for young men and women like you. You've got qualities that would have taken you places if it hadn't been for you losing your head and butchering those squints on Torfan. Hell, I wouldn't even have been surprised if they'd put admiral's bars on your shoulders someday. Right now though, even if you beat the court martial, you'll never serve in the Alliance again. But I've got a proposal you should consider if you want to keep fighting for the cause your men died for, if you want to keep fighting for humanity."

"Sir?"

The Admiral gestured to the file on the desk.

"I won't sugarcoat it, son. If you accept my offer, I will ask you to do things that will seem to go against everything you've been taught to believe. Some of it will seem barbaric, illegal, and even immoral but I promise you – everything I ask you to do will be what is _necessary_ to safeguard our race's place in the galaxy," Admiral Cullen paused as Shepard picked up the file and opened it, "I trust you've heard of the N7 Marine Special Operations Division?"

Shepard nodded.

"I have a place for you in something that makes MSOD look like the space cadets."

* * *

His head was killing him. As Shepard opened his eyes, he was almost blinded by the bright iridescent lights of what looked like a medical bay. Shielding his eyes with the back of his hand, he blinked several times, trying to shake the unmistakable haze of anaesthetic from his system.

"How do you feel, Commander Shepard?"

Admiral Cullen was suddenly hovering over him, handing him a mirror.

"_Commander _Shepard, sir?"

The Admiral gestured towards the mirror. Giving his head a final shake, Shepard looked into the mirror and almost fell out of his bed. He was staring at his own reflection but the face was that of a stranger's. His sandy blonde hair had been cut short and was now a dark, chestnut brown. Grey-blue eyes stared back at him, framed by sharply defined cheekbones.

The last few days had gone by in a blur. After checking in with Admiral Cullen, he'd been immediately transported to a hidden facility on an asteroid orbiting a star he'd never heard of. There, military doctor had told him he'd be undergoing major cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. Before he'd even had time to allow that to sink in, a team of surgeons had had him stripped down to his skivvies and were wheeling him into an operating room.

Still in shock, Shepherd ran his hand along the side of his jaw, feeling a several-day-old growth of stubble covering his face. _How long was I out for?_ He understood the change in hair colour. After several hundred years of racial intermingling on Earth, recessive traits such as blonde hair had become extremely rare. The dark brown would enable him to blend in far more easily. What struck him the most though, were his new facial features.

With a limited timeframe to work with, the surgeons had been unable to do any major reconstruction and had instead made subtle changes. However, the cumulative effect was mindblowing. On a conscious level, his mind accepted that the face in the mirror was his, but his subconscious was having a more difficult time. The disconnect made him feel dizzy and suddenly he wanted to throw up. Admiral Cullen shoved a steel bowl in front of him and Shepard gratefully heaved into it.

"The official story is that Staff Lieutenant John Shepard died six months after the action on Torfan. Death was ruled a suicide due to a severe case of undiagnosed PTSD. Unofficially, you've been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and reassigned to the Epsilon Program under my command."

_Epsilon Program? _Admiral Cullen nodded to the omnitool strapped to Shepard's wrist as if he had just read his mind.

"My operators take the missions nobody else can. My operators hit the targets no one else can reach. The Epsilon Program exists to do what is necessary for the survival of the human race in a hostile galaxy. Nobody knows who we are because we don't exist. From this moment, you are accountable only to me and your mission."

Shepard tried to get out of bed but lost his balance, crashing into a medical cart before the Admiral grabbed his arm.

"We've erased your pre-service history and given you cosmetic surgery to eliminate any links to your past. Colony records at Mindoir were destroyed in the attack, which made our job far easier."

Admiral Cullen helped him to his feet and continued.

"Best you'd forget what happened there too, son. Memories like that have a bad habit of sneaking up on you at the worst times."

The Admiral guided him to the door and pushed a change of clothes into his arms.

"Get dressed, Shepard, we've got a lot of work to do."

* * *

Lieutenant Commander John Shepard slowly let the air out of his lungs, settling into a steady breathing rhythm as he looked through the scope of a heavy sniper rifle. Turning his head slightly, he whispered into a collar-mounted comlink. A holo of the target, one Michael Sorenson, head of an anarchist movement on New Liberty, lay beside his rifle.

"Archer Five, give me a sitrep, over."

Through the scope, he could out the three vehicles making their way down the road. A voice crackled in his ear.

"Target is on the move. We haven't been able to narrow down which vehicle in the convoy he's in, over."

Shepard cursed under his breath.

"Fire a few rounds in their direction but do not fire directly on the convoy. We'll figure out where the target is based on their reaction."

"Roger that, Archer Lead."

The sharp report of a heavy machine gun shattered the morning tranquil, tracers slamming into the road directly in front of the first vehicle. The first two vehicles skidded to a halt and their occupants spilled out, firing automatic weapons into the treeline. The last vehicle peeled off and sped back in the direction it had come.

_Smart. I would have guessed it was the one in the middle._

"Hold them here Archer Five, I'm going after the target."

Collapsing the sniper rifle, Shepard threw off the camouflage cloak he was lying under and jumped on a lightweight scout skimmer he had hidden nearby earlier. Opening the throttle, he was able to quickly catch up to the target vehicle, ducking as a bodyguard leaned out and fired a burst in his direction. Gritting his teeth, he instinctively ducked as a civilian skimmer screamed by in the other direction. The pursuit was taking them back into the colony, where the narrow streets and increased traffic would make it more difficult to track his quarry. Shepard drew his sidearm and carefully aimed it at the speeding vehicle's primary control surfaces. Firing several shots, he watched as the skimmer skidded out of control, slamming into a prefab. Sorenson, a heavyset man with greying hair who looked to be about in his early 50s, staggered out of the wreckage and ran into an alleyway as two bodyguards put down a deadly hail of cover fire in Shepard's direction. Ducking behind the handlebars of his scout skimmer, Shepard gunned the throttle and aimed his vehicle at the wreck, muttering a silent prayer that the kinetic barriers of his exosuit armour would hold. Too late, one of the bodyguards realized what he was doing and shouted a warning before Shepard's skimmer slammed into him, impaling him against the wall. Leaping off the skimmer, Shepard tackled the other bodyguard and dispatched him in one smooth motion before taking off after Sorenson.

"Archer Lead to Archer Five, I'm in pursuit of the target on foot back at the main colony. I may need some help here."

The distinctive growl of Operations Chief Yoshida crackled over the comlink.

"Sorry boss, we've got problems of our own. Reinforcements just showed up and they brought some heavy guns. We'll try to keep them off your back but that's about all we can do."

Shepard leapt over a low fence and clicked his comlink.

"Acknowledged, Archer Five. Keep me informed if the situation changes."

Despite his age and heavy build, Sorenson could move. Ducking between prefabs and cutting down twisting alleyways, Shepard sprinted after him until the older man reached a deadend and ran up a flight of stairs to a rooftop, only to find himself cornered. Turning to level his weapon at Shepard, he was met instead with an armoured fist that sent him flying across the roof, the pistol skidding out of his grasp.

"You can't just kill me here! There'll be witnesses!"

Shepard arched an eyebrow and looked around.

"We're on the roof of a water filtration centre, the tallest building in this settlement. Nobody can see us, unless you believe in God."

Sorenson looked pathetic as he scrambled away from Shepard on his back. His eyes darted about wildly, looking for an escape route but seeing none, desperation set into his face.

"Please! I was just doing it to feed my family!"

The man pulled out a holopic of a woman and two young children. He held it up like a religious icon, as if he could protect himself through sheer faith and willpower alone. Shepard drew his sidearm and grabbed Sorenson by the collar, hauling him to his feet.

"Right. You harvested red sand, shot two colonial militia officers when they came to shut you down, then blew up the Alliance liaison officer's prefab while he slept and you did it all to feed your family."

"The Alliance colonial development office lied to us! They lured us out here promising good farmland and opportunity then abandoned us when they discovered the planet wasn't what they thought it was! There was no other way! Please!" Sorenson grabbed Shepard's arm and tried to slip away but took another punch in the face for his trouble.

"If you take me in, they'll lock me up for life! What are you? A bounty hunter? I've got credits! I'll pay you double whatever the Alliance paid you and disappear!"

By now the man was hysterical and tears were flowing down his face.

"Please! You've got to let me go! I'll never be able to see my kids again! Have you got a wife? A family maybe? You've got to..."

Shepard coldly struck him across the face with the back of his sidearm.

"Who I am is of no concern to you Mr. Sorenson. I have my orders."

Placing the barrel of his pistol against the man's forehead, Shepard pulled the trigger. Sorenson's head snapped back as the light in his eyes went dim. Stepping down off the roof, Shepard spoke into his comlink.

"This is Archer Lead to all Archer elements. The target has been neutralized, repeat, the target has been neutralized. Make for extraction site Echo-Two for pickup, over."

Chief Yoshida's voice crackled over the comlink. Shepard could hear the chatter of automatic weapons fire and the distinctive report of mortar fire in the distance.

"This is Archer Five, we are under heavy enemy fire and have taken casualties. Requesting immediate assistance and a medevac pickup!"

The comlink crackled again.

"Archer Lead, this is Archer Five. We're close enough to render assistance. Just say the word."

A cloud of dust was billowing in the distance, a few kilometres down the road. More enemy reinforcements.

"That's a negative Archer Three," Shepard said sharply into his comlink, "Archer Five, give me a sitrep!"

"Two KIA, three wounded, including myself. We can't make it to the extraction site on our own," Yoshida responded, breathing heavily into his mouthpiece. Shepard switched channels.

"Archer Lead to SSV _Hamburg_, do you copy?"

A calm, clinical-sounding voice responded almost immediately, contrasting sharply with Yoshida's harried tone.

"SSV _Hamburg_ reads, Archer Lead. What have you got?"

"I need fire support on grid square Delta-Two-Six."

"Say again, Archer Lead? That's right on top of one of your units."

Shepard closed his eyes for a moment to allow the full weight of his decision to sink in before answering.

"Affirmative, _Hamburg_. That was not a mistake. Fire support on grid coordinates Delta-Two-Six, now!"

Holstering his sidearm, Shepard hopped to the ground and started running towards the extraction zone.

"All Archer elements, fall back to the extraction zone immediately. Enemy forces are converging on the area."

Pausing for a moment, Shepard switched back to a private channel.

"Chief, this is Shepard. I'm sorry."

There was no response for a moment but then Yoshida's baritone voice sounded in his ear.

"I understand sir. It's been an honour serving under you."

The sky suddenly lit up as several streaks of light slammed into the ground in the distance, the impact sending shockwaves in every direction and deafening Shepard momentarily. The commlink buzzed for a moment then cut out to static.

* * *

"... the target was neutralized at approximately 09:00 hours this morning, sir. Surviving elements of Archer were successfully extracted by SSV _Hamburg_ shortly after."

Disembodied hands cut off the tip of a cigar and lit it, bringing it up to Admiral Cullen's face. The Admiral leaned into the holodisplay.

"Casualties?"

Shepard suddenly saw Operation Chief Yoshida's smiling face in the reflection of his glass and heard his booming laugh outside on the crew deck. He half expected the man to poke his head in the door, asking Shepard if he wanted to join the rest of the men for a game of poker. No matter how many times Shepard said no, Yoshida would always come back to ask again. Shepard suddenly found himself wishing he'd accepted the last time.

"Nine dead, two wounded."

Admiral Cullen nodded.

"Well done Commander. I'll see you back on Arcturus in a few days. You and your men have got a few days of leave saved up."

Shepard reached out to cut the link but then stopped.

"Was there something else, Commander?"

Shepard hesitated, choosing his words carefully.

"Permission to speak freely, sir?"

The Admiral waved his hand for him to continue.

"Do you ever have trouble sleeping, sir?"

Admiral Cullen puffed on his cigar thoughtfully for a moment.

"Nightmares, Commander?"

Shepard's eyebrows arched in surprise but the Admiral just closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

"It's not easy leading men into battle, son. Being in command means that sometimes you give orders knowing that your people are going to die. That can't affect your decisions. You want to know my recommendation Commander?"

Shepard nodded, although he already knew what the answer would be. The Admiral gestured to the glass Shepard had in front of him and the half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black beside it. For the first time since he'd met the man, Shepard thought he saw a glimmer of regret in Admiral Cullen's eyes.

"Keep pouring, son and promise you'll do better next time."

Admiral Cullen cut the link, leaving Shepard to sit alone in his cabin. Lighting a cigarette, Shepard took the bottle and poured himself another glass.


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

_Present Day_

The explosion blew Shepard clear of the escape pod, slamming him against a bulkhead and knocking the air out of his lungs. Looking for some sort of handhold, he spotted an exposed bit of wiring and swiped at it, only to miss it completely and propel himself further from safety. A voice was calling out to him and he realized it was Joker. The helmsman's hand was only a few feet away but it might as well have been a mile.

"Commander!"

Shepard shook his head. Twisting his body, he slammed his fist against the flashing emergency release for the escape pod and watched the cylindrical door slam shut. Another shockwave struck Shepard, sending him flying off into space. As he saw the wreckage of the Normandy finally disintegrate, panic began to set in.

_Focus, Marine! _His hardsuit was designed to shield its wearer from exposure to vacuum as well as enemy fire. If he stayed calm and relied on his training, he might have a chance. _Environmental seals? Check. Emergency air supply? Check. Emergency transponder activated? Check. Where the hell are the bad guys? _Panic momentarily returned and he frantically swivelled his head for signs of the _Normandy_'s attacker but it was gone.

It had been so sudden. The _Normandy_ was not designed for a straight fight, lacking the amour and shielding to last very long in a protracted duel, but he had never expected its defences to buckle so quickly. With its sensors knocked out immediately, all he had been able to see was the blinding intensity of the enemy ship's beam weapon slicing through the _Normandy_'s hull like it was made of paper.

_Leave that for the debrief. Focus on the present! Survival now, recollection later. _His mind automatically went back to his fourth day of Hostile Environment Assault Training on Titan, when Gunny Ellison had run the recruits through basic equipment orientation.

"_Pay attention, Marines! This lil' piece o'equipment here is the Onyx Mk. VI hardened exoskeleton. It is rated for vacuum and extreme temperatures between minus eighty and one hundred'an twenty degrees Celsius – do you have somewhere more important to be, Mr. Thomas? Keep listenin' – this lecture might just save your life someday! In the event you find yourself operating in an airless environment, this sumbitch has an air supply that'll keep you alive for up to seventy-two hours..." _

_Seventy-two hours. _Shepard did the math. _Where are we? _The nearest friendly outpost would be the Turian colony of Minerva where the _Normandy_ had restocked on provisions two days ago. _Closer to two and a half. Sixty hours, give or take. _He closed his eyes and focused on keeping relaxed, taking long, deep breaths. _Chances of survival? Slim, but not nonexistent..._

A red light began flashing in his helmet display and his hardsuit's VI sounded a warning.

"_Alert. Suit integrity has been compromised. Oxygen levels falling. Alert. Suit integrity..."_

Frantically, Shepard checked for hardsuit punctures but couldn't find any. Reaching his hands behind his head, his blood ran cold.

_Please don't let it be - oh shit... _ The seals connecting his helmet to the rest of the hardsuit had broken, leaking precious oxygen into space.

"_... In the event your environmental seals break, it is of the utmost importance that you get them fixed BEFORE you deploy or y'all had better learn to hold your breath. That seventy-two hours I told you about before is gonna turn into just enough time to say a few prayers and kiss your dumb ass goodbye..." _

Shepard desperately grabbed at the leaking air line connected to the back of his helmet. The airflow indicator displayed on the visor of his helmet continued to drop. His hand struck the main line, tearing it completely free. _End of the line, John. _

Resigning himself to his fate, he relaxed and a strange sense of calm and relief began to wash over him. _No more missions. _Another seal broke and the bright smiles of young men and women he'd commanded played through his mind like a slideshow. _No more dead Marines._ An audio alarm began blaring and the memory of a holopic of a newborn baby girl appeared, fresh as the day Corporal Wilson had excitedly shown it to him before the mission on New Liberty. _No more condolence letters for next of kin. _He could no longer feel his fingers._ I wonder how they'll remember me? _A serene smile crept across his face. _Heroes and villains are for the living... why do you give a fuck?_

The suit's VI continued to drone on, _"Alert. Oxygen levels critical. Alert. Oxygen levels critical..." _

_The Council, the Alliance... the Reapers... somebody else's problem now. _

Shepard took a final breath, taking in the last of the air. Closing his eyes for the final time, he let it flow gently out of his lungs and numbness set into his limbs. His heart rate slowly dropped to zero on the lifesign monitor and his hardsuit's emergency transponder began issuing a new signal.

"_Commander John Shepard. Citadel Council Special Tactics and Reconnaissance Branch Operative ID: 4586-72A. Systems Alliance Marine Corps, Serial Number: N7-11285-M2172. Status: KIA."_

_

* * *

_

Miranda Lawson was frustrated. The elite team of scientists and doctors the Illusive Man had assembled for the Lazarus Project had been making steady progress over the last two years but just as it seemed like this insane experiment might actually work, they had run into a dead end. Commander John Shepard had been a frozen corpse when Cerberus had finally secured his body. Although the cold vacuum of space had preserved his body from normal decomposition, the rupture in his hardsuit that had killed him had also done serious damage. By the time Cerberus was able to steal him away, it had already been several weeks. Had they acquired the body earlier, preferably within the first few days, it would have saved them a great deal of trouble.

Despite all the obstacles and setbacks however, the Lazarus Project had done more than anybody would have believed possible. Even the Illusive Man had been impressed. Their chance of success had always been limited, but then that had been why she had been put in charge of the project. Miranda allowed herself to feel some satisfaction at how much they had been able to do under her leadership. They had done things modern science and medicine had been preaching was impossible. The Commander was technically alive again.

Miranda frowned and corrected herself. _His body is technically alive. His mind... not so much. _Compared to restoring higher brain functions without doing irreversible damage to the personality wired underneath, rebuilding Shepard's body had been a simple affair – a high school biology project taken to its extreme. There was just so much that remained unknown about how the human mind worked. The science was simple enough, but the intricacies of how memories, skill sets, and personality were stored might as well have been magic. The Illusive Man had made it very clear however, that Shepard had to be brought back exactly the same as the day he'd died.

She chewed on the tip of her pen thoughtfully. It was a habit she'd had since childhood and one she'd never been able to kick. It annoyed her whenever she was aware she was doing it but she doubted she'd ever be able to stop. Perhaps bad habits were just one of those unexplainable personality traits that her team had been having so much trouble with while reconstructing Shepard's mind.

Miranda looked through the observation windows at the Commander's body, lying below her on an operating table where Wilson had his head hooked up to some diagnostic equipment. The Illusive Man's prohibition on altering the Commander unnecessarily in any way had prevented her from experimenting with physical augmentations. _Not that he'd need them. _The Alliance had already given him the modifications they gave many of their soldiers, like denser musculature and ocular enhancements. Like all government bureaucracies, the Alliance was not known for its largesse but when it came to its elite N7 personnel, no expense was spared. He was not overly muscular but rather lean and athletic, his muscles toned and well-defined. His was the body of a soldier. Not some average grunt manning an outpost on some backwater, but a trained killer.

Lying on that table, his body perfectly reconstructed, chest rising and falling with every breath and his eyes closed peacefully, Wilson had commented that it looked like he was asleep. Miranda had to disagree. To her trained eye, Shepard's motionless form seemed more like an inert weapon awaiting activation.

_Which is exactly what he is._ She'd read his file. Like her, Shepard was a problem solver. When the Alliance or the Citadel Council had had a problem no one else could solve, they sent Shepard. Unlike her, Shepard solved problems through the raw expression of violence, bludgeoning through obstacles without regard of collateral damage. Also unlike her, Shepard had become the face of humanity, a physical representation of their species' unrelenting will to survive. _Or at least that's what the Council and the Alliance wanted the galaxy to believe. _

Miranda still couldn't quite understand it and judging from what she had seen of his public appearances, neither had Shepard. He always looked uncomfortable in front of the cameras, out of his element, like a caged predator. Miranda herself had little use for "heroes", having had enough experience with them to realize they seldom lived up to their reputations. Nevertheless, heroic icons could be useful for their inherent credibility and the respect they inspired, two things Cerberus lacked despite its vast material resources and political connections. Seeing him from a distance, it had just seemed strange that a common foot soldier could be that heroic icon.

Lying here in front of her now though, she had to admit he was far from common and definitely no mere foot soldier. He was still just a soldier, lacking the sophistication and subtlety of someone like herself, but he had been an undeniably effective soldier, she grudgingly admitted to herself.

"_Miranda? You might want to take a look at this..." _

Miranda's eyes narrowed. She leaned over the intercom on the observation deck and jabbed the transmit button with her finger.

"What is it, Wilson?"

"His heart rate just spiked. Something's not right."

Miranda dropped her dataslate and ran down to the operating chamber. Swivelling the diagnostics cart around, her eyes widened. In addition to his increased heart rate, the line on the display showing Shepard's neurological activity was fluctuating wildly.

"There. On the monitor. Something's wrong."

Wilson gestured to Shepard's fluttering eyelids.

"He's reacting to outside stimuli. Showing an awareness of his surroundings."

As Miranda turned her head to look, Shepard's eyes flew open.

"Oh my God, Miranda... I think he's waking up!"

Several of the monitors on the diagnostics cart began beeping. _What did you do, Wilson?_ Miranda's eyes fell on a syringe Wilson had left on the side of the operating table. Earlier that week, Wilson had suggested an experimental treatment he'd worked on as a civilian to awaken coma patients. The treatment involved altering variables like heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature in such a way as to "shock" the brain awake. Pointing out that two of Wilson's trial patients had died and another suffered serious brain damage, Miranda had refused to allow him to attempt it on Shepard. It seemed like Wilson had attempted it anyway and what she had feared was coming to pass.

"Damn it, Wilson! He's not ready yet. Give him the sedative!"

As Wilson punched in the dosage, Shepard raised his arm. It should have been impossible. Even in Wilson's most positive trial results, the patients had taken days before they even showed preliminary brain activity, yet Shepard was already awake and trying to get up. Shepard looked straight into her face, his sea grey eyes bewildered and confused. Recovering quickly from her shock, Miranda grabbed his arm and firmly pushed it down.

"Shepard – don't try to move," she said, trying to keep her voice as calm as she could, "Just lie still. Try to stay calm."

Wilson was anything but calm. He looked up from the monitor with a panicked expression on his face.

"Heart rate still climbing. Brain activity is off the charts! Stats pushing into the red zone. It's not working!"

Miranda released Shepard's arm and marched around to the monitor.

"Another dose. Now!"

Wilson tried again but shook his head. Fully conscious now, Shepard's intense military training and conditioning was triggering an automatic response, actively fighting the sedative by increasing his metabolism. The irony of the situation was absurd._ Shepard is going to kill himself while trying to save himself from the people trying to save him._ Miranda took Shepard's hand and gently squeezed it as she looked reassuringly into his eyes, trying to find a connection. His icy gaze locked with hers. For a moment it had no effect, but then she saw his eyes slowly close and his muscles visibly relax as he gave in to the sedative.

"Heart rate dropping. Stats falling back into normal range. That was too close. We almost lost him."

Miranda turned and directed a withering look at Wilson.

"I told you your estimates were off. Run the numbers again."

As Wilson left the operating theatre, Miranda realized she was still grasping Shepard's hand. Releasing it, she saw a visibly red outline where his hand had been. Even dosed with twice the sedative needed to knock out a full-grown man, he had grabbed her firmly enough to leave marks. Surprising as that was, it was the look in his eyes that both troubled and intrigued her the most. There had been a fire there that she had never seen before, a fire that betrayed a spirit that refused to surrender. _What kind of man are we resurrecting? I hope the Illusive Man knows what he's doing._

_

* * *

_

"_Commander, wake up!"_

John Shepard slowly opened his eyes, finding himself staring into the bright iridescent lights of some sort of medical facility.

_Déjà vu_.

"_Shepard, do you hear me? Get out of that bed now!" _

_Where have I heard that voice before? _Twisting his head to try and find where the voice was coming from, he grabbed his jaw as he felt the familiar stiffness of anaesthetic still coursing through his system. As he tried to sit up, a sharp pain shot through his side and when he put his hand to his side, he felt the familiar damp sensation of blood.

"_Shepard your scars aren't healed but I need you to get moving. This facility is under attack!" _

Grimacing as he pulled himself up off the operating table he'd been lying on, he grabbed a towel off a cart and pressed it against his side. The flow of blood had already stopped as advanced coagulants in his blood, a souvenir of his service with the Alliance, had begun working.

"_There's a pistol and a change of clothes in the locker on the other side of the room. Hurry!"_

_What kind of medical facility keeps firearms in their operating rooms?_ Opening a secured weapons locker, Shepard grabbed a pistol and a handful of thermal clips. He pulled a shirt over his head and buckled up some trousers, loading the pistol automatically despite the wooziness he still felt.

"_Someone's hacking security trying to kill you and security mechs are closing in on your position - Take cover!"_

Shepard heard the locking mechanism on the door being sliced and ducked behind a heavy, wheeled metal cart. If the mechs the voice was talking about had thermal imaging, he doubted the cart would provide much protection but he had something else in mind. As the security door opened and a LOKI mech stepped into the room, Shepard propelled the cart as hard as he could into the mech's midsection, sending it flying into the mechs behind it.

Although they had been relatively uncommon at the time, he'd encountered LOKI mechs before as both a Spectre and a marine. They were cheap, relentless and relatively effective in large numbers but were otherwise a poor substitute for real soldiers. Lightly built and usually unarmoured, their primitive VIs did not even allow for basic tactical programming like using cover to avoid enemy fire.

Putting a few rounds into the mechs to make sure they stayed down, Shepard tried to get his bearings. He had thought he was in some sort of hospital but it appeared he was wrong. He was standing in an observation area with expansive windows that looked out into a starry night sky. Based on the strange way the mechs had fallen, he guessed he was either in space or on an ultra low gravity moon. Picking up a piece of wreckage, he released it and watched it slam into a wall.

_Simulated gravity_. He was in space somewhere. Judging by the fact the stars weren't moving, he concluded the facility was on a space station. The smooth, metallic walls and clear glass guardrails would have given the facility a sleek, clean appearance were it not for the dead bodies and scorched impact marks adorning the walls.

Kneeling next to one of the bodies, Shepard rolled it over onto its back and examined it. The lifeless eyes of a young woman stared up at him. She was wearing a black uniform with orange and white highlights. Embroidered on the collar was an elongated diamond logo that he didn't recognize. Shepard checked the pocket for identification or anything that could give him a clue as to where he was but found nothing.

"_Don't waste time - I can't keep the mechs distracted for long!"_

Shepard suddenly remembered where he'd heard that voice before. _It's the blue-eyed brunette... what was her name? _

"_Keep moving, we need to get you to the shuttles. Head down the hallway on your right and keep going until you reach the atrium. There will be three mechs in the office on the left side of the hallway."_

Holding his pistol at the ready, Shepard followed the voice's directions. Strangely, he felt like he was back in N7 training on Arcturus, working his way through a killhouse as Admiral Cullen gave him instructions. _Like riding a bike. _Spotting the mechs, he took them down easily, instinctively putting two shots in the head of each target, just as they'd taught him when he'd first earned his N1 classification years ago.

Continuing down the hall and up a flight of stairs, he found more dead bodies but other than that, the station seemed deserted.

"_You're doing great, Shepard. Head to the atrium and I'll try to meet you there..." _

The voice was cut off by the sound of gunshots and then an explosion. _Miranda. Her name was Miranda_. Shepard closed his eyes momentarily and whispered a prayer for the blue-eyed brunette. He had never been a religious man, praying more out of habit than true belief. Still, as a Marine, he had discovered that sometimes it was comforting to think there was some greater power that existed in the universe, even if he had no idea what form it took.

Focussing once more on the task at hand, Shepard quickly moved up to a security door but stopped when he heard gunfire. _Sounds like I'm not the only one still alive in here._ Checking the thermal clip on his pistol, Shepard took a deep breath then burst through the security door into a wide, open area. _This must be the atrium 'Miranda' was talking about._

A man dressed in a black field uniform bearing the elongated diamond emblem Shepard had seen earlier was exchanging fire with a number of mechs. Taking aim while the other man was still holding their attention, Shepard dropped each mech in turn with two quick shots each. As he slid into cover, the man turned to look at him, his dark brown eyes betraying his shock.

"Shepard? I thought you were still a work in progress!"

Shepard's eyes narrowed.

"Look pal, I don't know where I am or how I got here. Plus my head feels like an overripe melon ready to split open. How about you fill me in a little?"

"Damn... yeah, I forgot this is all new to you. Sorry about that," The man seemed taken aback, just as Shepard had intended.

"I'm Jacob Taylor. Things must be worse than I thought if Miranda's got you running around. I'll fill you in, but we better get you to the..."

A door opened on the other side of the room and several more mechs marched out, firing their weapons as they advanced.

"Damn it!" Jacob swore, firing a few shots back from behind cover. Shepard ducked his head as an incoming slug slammed into the wall behind his head.

"What is this place? Where am I?"

Jacob ignored him.

"We need to get you out of here, Shepard. I'll give you some covering fire while you get to that door across from us!"

Shepard risked a glance at the advancing mechs. As he'd expected, they had stopped advancing at a pre-programmed distance and were firing ineffectually, their shots flying wide and high. LOKI mechs were intended more as a deterrent than as true killing machines.

"Ever since I woke up, someone's been telling me where to go and what to do. I need answers!"

Jacob fired a few more shots over his shoulder, taking out one of the mechs with a solid hit to the torso.

"Now's really not a great place for questions, Shepard. Not with those mechs shooting at us!"

Shepard reloaded his pistol and waited for a moment. One of the peculiar quirks of LOKI mechs was that their programming always forced them to empty their weapons in a barrage of shots, then reload and repeat until the target was either dead or had vacated the area. As the volume of fire seemed to die down, Shepard took a deep breath and leaned out from cover, dropping a line of five mechs with a succession of shots. As the atrium went silent, he turned to Jacob.

"How about now?"


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Miranda watched Shepard's progress on the station's internal security network as she tried to override the virus that had corrupted the security mechs' IFF programming. As project director, she should have had full administrative authority over the station's security systems but whoever had introduced the virus had staged an all-out hacking attack on the station's link to Cerberus' galaxy-wide communications network. The attack had triggered automatic security protocols that locked down network access for every person assigned to the Lazarus Project, including her. Such safeguards existed to protect Cerberus' other cells in the event one of them was compromised but right now, they were preventing her from shutting down the mechs that were tearing apart the station and killing her staff.

_It had to be an inside job._ The ease with which the intruder had found the master override for the station's security network and the fact they knew exactly which access node to attack to force the station's Cerberus network access into lockdown meant one of her staff was responsible. The existence of a traitor on the station bothered her intensely. Miranda had always prided herself for her ability to read people and the idea that someone on her staff had been able to hide such a plot was unthinkable. Right now though, none of it mattered. All that mattered was the survival of the man in the monitor she was watching. The life of every person on the station was of secondary importance to the safety of Commander John Shepard. _Including mine._

Fortunately, Shepard seemed fully capable of taking care of himself. Death from asphyxiation, six weeks of cryogenic freezing, and two years of complete physical and neurological reconstruction seemed to have done nothing to dull his combat skills. She watched him gun down three mechs as if he was shooting at paper targets on a firing range.

_Checkmate_. Although she'd been unable to shut down the mechs or restore their programming, Miranda had been able to change their patrol routes away from Shepard. The traitor had tried to fight back but in the process had betrayed the system access code they were using, allowing her to track his or her location. The network lockdown had disabled remote access to the station's security systems and like her, the traitor was being forced to use hard-linked terminals. _Server Room B. One of the maintenance staff maybe?_ Using the internal security network to locate all of her surviving staff, Miranda was able to quickly find her traitor. She gritted her teeth. _I should have suspected. _

Miranda checked back on Shepard and saw he was making good progress. It was time for her to go. She had stayed in one place for too long and according to the reprogrammed patrol routes she'd inputted, the security mechs would be making another pass down this corridor within the next few minutes.

"You're doing great, Shepard. Head to the atrium and I'll try to meet you there..."

The reflection of the mech gave her just enough warning to throw herself clear as a stream of slugs shattered the console where she had been standing a split second ago. With a casual flip of her wrist, Miranda threw the attacking mechs off a balcony with a wave of pure biotic power.

_Wilson, you son of a bitch. I am going to kill you._ She leapt off the balcony after the mechs, floating to the alcove below in a biotic field. Flipping her hair back, she checked the thermal clip in her pistol and made her way towards the shuttle bay.

* * *

A warning light flashed on Jacob's pistol as he fired a shot into a mech. Reaching out with his hand, he finished it off by slamming it against a wall with his biotics. He ducked back behind some cooling pipes and he ejected the spent thermal clip from his pistol. Realizing that had been his last one, he swore in frustration.

"I'm empty!"

Shepard didn't even take his eyes off his targets as he reached down to his belt with one hand and tossed Jacob one of the thermal clips he had shoved in his waistband. Jacob caught the clip, reloaded his pistol, and took down another mech as it stepped out from behind a doorway. Although Jacob had thought of himself as an above average soldier, having qualified for the coveted N classification while serving as an Alliance marine, Shepard was in a whole other league. He moved with the fluidity and economy of motion of a soldier who had faced every conceivable combat situation and knew exactly where to go and what to do on the battlefield. From what he had seen, he didn't think Shepard had wasted a single shot.

"Time to move, Taylor. Which way to Server Room B?"

Jacob pointed Shepard up a flight of stairs. Frowning, he jumped over an overturned table and followed Shepard. Something wasn't right. Ever since Wilson had contacted them, it seemed like mech resistance had gotten stronger. _What's Wilson doing in D wing anyway?_ As one of the senior medical staff, Wilson's quarters had been all the way on the other side of the station. D wing was where most of the security and maintenance staff worked and lived. _What if Wilson did this?_

Jacob pushed his suspicions out of his mind. Wilson was arrogant, abrasive, and misogynistic but a traitor? After Miranda, no one had devoted as much time and effort into the Lazarus Project. Whenever the medical team announced a breakthrough, no one was ever as excited or eager to claim credit as Wilson was. _Why would Wilson just throw two years of his own work away?_

The sound of Wilson moaning in agony guided them to where he was hiding. The doctor had propped himself up against one of the servers and was grabbing at his leg where he had obviously been shot. Although he had hastily applied a tourniquet, blood was still seeping through his trouser leg.

"Taylor, find me some medigel while I take a look at his leg."

Jacob found a first aid station and tossed Shepard a medigel pack. Ripping open the packaging with his teeth, Shepard pulled up Wilson's trouser leg and applied the gel over the wound. As Wilson staggered to his feet, Shepard gestured at the wounded leg and nudged a disabled mech lying on the floor with the toe of his boot.

"Single shot fired at close range. You were lucky it didn't aim higher."

Wilson grunted in response.

"Yeh, I guess so. I thought maybe I could shut down the security mechs. But whoever did this fried the whole system. Completely irreversible."

Jacob crossed his arms.

"We didn't ask what you were doing. How did you even get here? You were in the bio wing."

As far as Jacob knew, Wilson was useless with technology. Brilliant as he was, Wilson had always shown a disdain for any technology he didn't directly need to do his work. The half empty pistol Wilson still gripped in his right hand caught Jacob's attention. _I thought Wilson was useless with firearms. What the hell? _The two disabled mechs on the floor next to the doctor provided a pretty strong argument for the man's combat abilities.

Wilson glared at him.

"Weren't you listening? I came here to try and fix this. Besides, I was shot! How do you explain that?"

Just as Jacob was going to respond, Shepard stepped between them.

"I don't care who set up who – those mechs are shooting at all of us. We'll sort it out later!"

Wilson looked like he was about to say something, but to Jacob's surprise he seemed to think better of it as Shepard shut him up with a simple look. Realizing Miranda hadn't contacted him since instructing him to go find Shepard, Jacob went over to a security console.

"We need to find Miranda first. We can't just leave her behind."

Wilson grabbed his shoulder.

"Forget about Miranda. She was over in D wing. The mechs were all over that sector. There's no way she survived."

Jacob angrily brushed Wilson aside.

"A bunch of mechs won't drop Miranda. She's alive."

Jacob had known Miranda Lawson for almost three years. In that time, Jacob had never seen a problem Miranda hadn't been able to solve with her potent mix of superlative intelligence, breathtaking natural beauty, and superior biotic ability and combat acumen. Many of her subordinates often mistook her indefatigable drive and determination for cold indifference, earning her the nickname "Ice Queen", but Jacob had come to realize her impersonal manner was simply a manifestation of her absolute professionalism and uncompromisingly high standards – standards she held herself to, not just her subordinates. She was one of the only people in Cerberus Jacob genuinely respected and the two had developed a strong working relationship. He'd once hoped it might develop into something more, but nothing had ever really come of those dreams. They had gone out a few times, but both of them had quickly realized he would never be able to keep up with her. _But this is Miranda Lawson we're talking about. Is there a man in the galaxy who could match up?_

She was by far the most formidable person he'd ever met and demanded perfection in all things, including those she chose to become close to.

"Then why isn't she here? Why haven't we heard from her? There are only two possible explanations: she's either dead... or she's the traitor!"

Once again, Shepard stepped between them, this time grabbing both of them in an iron grip.

"Enough! Miranda woke me up and warned me about the mechs. She's not the traitor. We can worry about that later. Right now we need to get to the shuttle bay. You two can either shut up and help me get there or I'll leave you here and find it myself."

Releasing Jacob and Wilson, Shepard stuffed a few packages of medigel into his pockets and walked away. Glancing at Wilson for a second, Jacob called out to Shepard.

"We need to work together. If I tell you who we work for, will you trust me?"

Wilson arched an eyebrow. "This really isn't the time, Jacob."

Jacob shook his head, glaring at the other man. "We won't make it if he's expecting a shot in the back."

Wilson snorted and threw up his hands. "If you want to piss off the boss, it's your ass."

Shepard looked back and forth between them both warily. Jacob turned to face him. "The Lazarus Project, the program that rebuilt you—" He drew a breath. "It's funded and controlled by Cerberus."

_The moment of truth_. Since Cerberus had turned rogue, the Alliance and the Citadel Council had attempted to shut it down on more than one occasion, often utilizing black operations involving their most elite and secretive special forces operators. _Operators like one Commander John Shepard._

Jacob didn't know much about the man, but he'd glanced at his classified service history. Shepard had taken down more than a few Cerberus projects. That exposure meant Shepard knew as much about Cerberus' more unsavoury activities as anyone outside the Cerberus command structure. When Shepard's gun hand moved, for a moment Jacob thought the man would simply gun them down but instead Shepard simply holstered his pistol and put his hands on his hips.

"Cerberus. So you work for the Illusive Man?"

Jacob nodded. Shepard's steely grey eyes seemed to be staring right through Jacob as his brain processed what the Cerberus operative had told him.

"I wiped out my share of Cerberus projects when I was a Spectre. Back then, they were trying to kill me. Why the change of heart?"

Jacob took a deep breath, feeling like his continued survival depended on his answer. Although Shepard's posture seemed relaxed, his hand was sitting just a few inches from his weapon and Jacob had no doubt such a man could kill both he and Wilson in less than the blink of an eye. Jacob chose his words carefully.

"Those answers are way above my pay grade. But basically, things change. The Alliance declared you dead. They gave up. Cerberus spent a fortune to bring you back."

Seeing that Shepard gave no indication of turning hostile, Jacob continued.

"Look, I'd be suspicious too. But I thought you deserved to know what's what. Once we're off the station, I'll take you to the Illusive Man. He'll explain everything. I promise."

Shepard responded with a simple nod.

"Fine. I'll find my answers one way or another but that can wait. Let's move out."

* * *

Miranda dodged a barrage of heavy assault cannon slugs as the YMIR mech advanced towards her. Taking cover behind some supply crates, she checked her pistol and cursed silently. _Half a clip left. Not that a full clip would make much of a difference._

The heavily armoured YMIR mech had taken pretty much everything she'd thrown at it without breaking stride. She looked down at the platform below. Just ahead, through the giant hanger doors and across the next platform, was a shuttle docking bay. _Too far to make a run for it?_

Her eyes widened as an idea came to her mind.

The room she was currently in was a repair bay. Running up through the wall the YMIR mech was advancing along were a number of fuel pipes going into the hanger bays. She doubted igniting the fuel would cause a big enough explosion to disable the mech, but it might just be enough to knock it off the platform, down to the next level some sixty metres below.

Taking a deep breath, Miranda waited for the hail of slugs to subside, then sprinted as hard as she could towards the gulf separating the repair bay from the docking bay. Using a brief burst of biotic power, she launched herself off the edge of the repair bay platform. As the mech slowly turned its guns towards her, she rolled onto the docking bay platform, turned, and tore two of the fueling pipes out of the wall with her biotics.

_Goodbye_. Miranda switched the ammunition setting on her pistol to incendiary and fired a few shots, covering her head as the leaking fuel exploded. Just as she had hoped, the explosion knocked the mech over the edge of the repair bay platform and it crashed to the bottom of the station, shattering like a cheap child's toy. Brushing herself off as she got to her feet, she walked over towards the last intact shuttle. The omnitool on her wrist beeped and a grim smile crept across her face.

_Just in time_. Since her close call with the mechs earlier, she had managed to program the internal security network to track Wilson's movement with the station's sophisticated DNA scanners. She frowned. According to the holographic display the omnitool projected, Wilson wasn't alone. Shepard and Jacob were also with him.

She went to the security door leading into the docking bay and drew her pistol. The door opened and Wilson almost ran into her. His face turned pale as if he'd seen a ghost.

"Miranda! But you're..."

Miranda finished his sentence for him.

"Dead?"

She placed the barrel of her pistol in the centre of Wilson's chest and fired. The traitor flew backwards, his body collapsing at a shocked Jacob's feet.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Miranda looked at Jacob coolly. Being the station's unofficial security officer, she was a little disappointed Jacob hadn't picked up on Wilson although she acknowledged the doctor had done a surprisingly thorough job of covering his tracks.

"My job. Wilson betrayed us all."

Shepard didn't even blink as he gestured at Wilson's lifeless form.

"You should have taken him alive. Seen what he knew."

Miranda studied Shepard for a moment, trying to decide whether his casual attitude towards seeing a man gunned down right in front of him was genuine or just an act.

"Too risky. I've put too much time and effort bringing you back to life to let you get killed now."

"You really think Wilson's capable of that?" Jacob asked incredulously.

"Not anymore," Miranda answered, glancing down at the pool of blood Wilson was lying in for emphasis.

"I had a feeling Wilson was just looking for a chance to shoot me in the back."

Answering the questioning look on Jacob's face, Shepard elaborated, "Wilson's leg. Single gunshot wound to the thigh, inflicted at extremely close quarters. Slug passed through his entire leg without nicking an artery or hitting the femur. I was a Marine officer for eleven years. I've seen more than my share of self-inflicted gunshot wounds by soldiers who wanted to get off the line."

Miranda was impressed. _Maybe Shepard really is more than just another empty-headed grunt. _

"Good instincts. Some people are far too trusting ever to see that coming." She glanced at Jacob, but he ignored her. "Come on. Let's grab this shuttle and get out of here. My boss wants to speak to you."

Shepard crossed his arms. "You mean the Illusive Man? I know you work for Cerberus."

Jacob had not done much to impress her that day, and she let him know it when they made eye contact. "Ah, Jacob. I should've known your conscience would get the better of you."

Jacob stood his ground. "Lying to the Commander isn't the way to get him to join our cause."

_Maybe Jacob has a point._ This had not been how she had planned the Lazarus project to end. She had hoped they could reawaken Shepard in a more... controlled environment.

"Well, since we're getting everything out in the open, is there anything else you want to ask before we go, Commander?"

Shepard gestured at the station around them.

"You're the Lazarus Project's director, aren't you?"

"That's right. I put two years of my life into this project – into you."

Miranda smiled thinly, barely allowing her impatience to show through and hoping Shepard would pick up on it. He either didn't or chose not to.

"What does Cerberus want from me?"

"Maybe you should ask the Illusive Man when you meet him. He poured virtually unlimited resources into Lazarus. Obviously he has some kind of plan for you."

In truth, even Miranda did not know exactly what the Illusive Man had planned for Shepard. If he wanted only the knowledge contained in Shepard's brain, there were far cheaper and easier ways of attaining it than resurrecting him as a living, breathing human being. She knew the Illusive Man's plans likely required Shepard's willing cooperation, although she wondered how he hoped to secure that. Not knowing exactly what the Illusive Man had planned bothered her, but she trusted that he knew what he was doing.

"Where are we going?"

"Another Cerberus facility. The Illusive Man is waiting for you there."

Miranda kept her answers short, trying to convince Shepard to give up his questioning. Fixing a cold gaze on her, he tried to break her down. She had no doubt the tactic worked on most people, but it wouldn't on her. After years of having had her father use the same approach on her, she had eventually learned to resist it.

She veiled her thoughts behind an emotionless facade until he finally gave up.

"I've had enough of this station to last a lifetime."

Miranda suppressed a smile at the irony of his statement.

"Or two, in your case. Come on."

* * *

"Before you meet with the Illusive Man, we need to ask a few questions to evaluate your condition."

Shepard slowly turned his head towards Miranda, his eyes drawing a line up her long, slender neck, over her chin, along her delicate features and across her flawless, porcelain skin before settling on a point just above her eyes. It was a trick he'd learned over the years to give the impression of eye contact without actually allowing the other person to look into his eyes. A simple look could betray much and Shepard had no intention of giving that kind of advantage to the blue-eyed brunette sitting across from him. She was possibly one of the most physically beautiful women he'd ever seen, almost distractingly so... _ She's just another pretty face. Focus!_

"Come on, Miranda. More tests? Shepard took down those mechs without any trouble. That has to be good enough."

Jacob had been relatively easy to break down. Despite working for an organization like Cerberus, Shepard recognized some familiar attributes almost immediately. Jacob was a straight shooter and a professional. A soldier, just like so many others Shepard had encountered through the years. No coward, but just trying to stay alive and impress his superiors like all the rest. _Two goals that are too often at odds with each other in practice. _

Shepard turned his attention back to Miranda. Dressed in a skintight jumpsuit that did nothing to hide her seductively curvaceous body, he had no doubt she'd used her attractiveness to her advantage with great effectiveness before, but it was the cold, calculating intelligence in those expressive azure eyes that he was the most wary of.

"It's been two years since the attack. The Illusive Man needs to know that Shepard's personality and memories are intact. Ask the questions."

Jacob reluctantly pulled up a program on his omnitool.

"Okay. Records show you were a colony kid. Lost your parents when slavers hit Mindoir. You enlisted and led troops during some heavy fighting, most notably on Torfan. Do you remember taking on some batarian slavers?"

The Cerberus operative gave Shepard an apologetic look. Shepard ignored it. The question gave him pause and he struggled to keep his composure. He thought back all those years ago and suddenly he was there again, directing his men in the middle of a firestorm, watching them get cut down but unable to do anything but press on.

"Those bastards were dug in deep in a fortified bunker. I sent a lot of good soldiers to their deaths. That's how it had to be," he answered evenly. _Whatever Cerberus wants out of this, it's probably not a good idea to let them get too deep into my head._

Jacob nodded sympathetically.

"You got the job done. That's all that matters."

Clearly uncomfortable with the questioning, Jacob turned to Miranda.

"Satisfied?"

Miranda kept her gaze fixed on Shepard, a gaze that gave him an uncomfortable feeling like she was testing him.

"Almost. Let's try something more recent. Virmire, where you destroyed Saren's cloning facility. You had to leave one of your squad behind to die in the blast. Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko was killed in action. Why did you leave him behind?"

Admiral Cullen's words echoed in Shepard's mind. They had sounded callous and cold-hearted at the time but since then he had learned how true they were.

"Being in command means that sometimes you give orders knowing that your people are going to die. That can't affect your decisions." Shepard's eyes hardened. "Kaidan gave his life for the mission. Without him, I couldn't have stopped Saren. He died a hero."

Miranda wrote some notes on a holographic datapad. Shepard noticed she used an actual stylus instead of the keyboard. Writing was a rare skill. He hadn't seen anyone take notes by hand since Admiral Cullen.

"Your memory seems solid. There are other tests we really should run..."

Jacob cut her off.

"Come on, Miranda. Enough with the quizzes. The memories are there and I can vouch for Shepard's combat skills personally."

Miranda looked at Shepard again for a moment, then slipped the datapad and stylus back into a pouch on her belt.

"I suppose you're right. We'll have to hope the Illusive Man accepts our little field test as evidence enough."


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

"It's unfortunate the Lazarus facility was destroyed. But given that it had fulfilled its purpose, perhaps it's for the best. How many survivors were there?"

The Illusive Man took a long drag of his cigarette, holding it in for a moment before letting it out in a thin wisp of smoke.

"Only Commander John Shepard, Operative Taylor, and myself," Miranda answered, clasping her hands behind her back.

"I'm going to need a casualty list from you, Miranda. I realize many of those who died on that station were your friends and colleagues. I promise you Cerberus will ensure that their families and next of kin will be taken care of."

Miranda had never gotten to know her subordinates on the project very well and she suspected the Illusive Man knew it. She had pushed her staff hard, and although it had not won her any friends, the project had been successful, despite being prematurely abbreviated.

She nodded in polite agreement to maintain the charade of concern. "It's the least we can do."

The Illusive Man blinked and the blue holographic rings that had replaced his irises rotated slightly. Miranda had more or less gotten used to the visual effect of the Illusive Man's optical implants but she could see why others might find it unnerving. Part of her wondered if that effect was intentional.

"It says in your report that Dr. Wilson turned out to be a traitor. It's impressive that he was able to hide his plot for so long. I'll have to inform the other cell leaders to be aware to the possibility that there may be more security leaks. It's a shame you couldn't capture him for questioning."

Miranda bristled as she remembered Shepard suggesting the same thing earlier on the Lazarus station. The rings in the Illusive Man's eyes rotated again as he picked up the glass sitting on the armrest of his chair, swirled the contents around a few times, and took a sip.

"Miranda, I requested that you conduct this debriefing in-person because I have a mission for you. You don't have to accept immediately, however. If you need some time off to recover from the Lazarus Project, I understand."

Miranda knew the offer had been extended more as a professional courtesy than anything else. She had never requested any time off since joining Cerberus but the Illusive Man was nothing if not impeccably polite.

"Thank you, but that won't be necessary."

Smiling thinly, the Illusive Man brought up a holographic display on his desk.

"Over the last several months, Cerberus has intercepted Alliance intelligence reports about human colonies in the Terminus being attacked."

That was hardly newsworthy. Human colonies were generally poorly defended, those in the Terminus even less so. In the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel, the Systems Alliance Navy had simply been stretched too thin. Miranda frowned. _A personal meeting to discuss a few missing colonies? Where's he going with this?_

"Normally, something like this we would leave to the Alliance. But we've discovered a disturbing pattern to the attacks. I've already dispatched reconnaissance teams to a number of the sites and all of them have reported the same thing: entire colonies disappearing with no visible signs of attack."

"Do we have any intelligence on new technologies that might be capable of this?" Miranda asked, her mind already working through possible explanations. The Illusive Man shook his head.

"I have a research team testing several theories but I doubt they'll find any answers. The strangest part of the pattern is that all of these colonies are located in systems where we know the Protheans were once active."

Miranda quickly realized what the Illusive Man was implying.

"You suspect these attacks might be connected to the Reapers?"

The Illusive Man lit another cigarette.

"I do. I was reluctant to do this, but I've moved up the timetable for my plans concerning Commander Shepard. If the Reapers are on the move, we'll have to adapt."

Rising to his feet, the Illusive Man put one hand on the back of his chair and stared out at the massive star that illuminated the room, bathing it in a soft, blue light.

"Miranda, do you remember a conversation we had two years ago about Shepard and the Reapers. You called him an icon, a beacon the Council and the rest of the galaxy would follow."

Miranda recalled that conversation as if it was yesterday. Two days later, the SSV Normandy had been destroyed in a surprise attack by an unknown ship. The majority of the crew had survived but Shepard had not. Those events had begun a long, torturous hunt for his body that had in turn led to the Lazarus Project.

"You were correct about Shepard being an icon but wrong when you said the galaxy would follow him. The Council and the Alliance distanced themselves from his warnings about the Reapers within six months of his death. Dead or alive, Shepard is no longer capable of rallying the galaxy against the Reapers."

"So he's worthless to us? After four billion credits and two years we brought back a discredited Spectre?"

The Illusive Man turned to face Miranda.

"No. He's still much more than that. Shepard is not a hero because Alliance propaganda or the media chose to portray him as one. Shepard is a hero because he did what no other being in the galaxy, human or otherwise, was able to do: He faced a Reaper and he killed it."

Settling into his chair, the Illusive Man began manipulating the holographic displays hovering above his desk.

"Shepard has been exposed to raw data on the Reapers. The beacons on Eden Prime and Virmire, the Conduit on Feros, the Prothean VI on Ilos. Shepard knows more about the Reapers than any being in the galaxy. If we're going to fight the Reapers, we'll need his help."

The Illusive Man punched a command into a console on his desk. Miranda's omnitool beeped.

"I've sent you the intel you will need for the first part of your new mission. A colony called Freedom's Progress was the latest to be hit. Maybe Shepard will be able to see something the Alliance and our own investigators missed at the other colonies."

Miranda arched an eyebrow.

"I hardly need to accompany Shepard personally. I can monitor his progress remotely. If your suspicions about the Reapers are wrong, I'll be able to better respond from one of our operations hubs."

The Illusive Man poured himself another drink.

"I've never been wrong before and I don't think this time will be the first. The patterns fit too strongly for this all to be a simple coincidence. You've always trusted me, Miranda. I'm asking you to put your trust in me once more."

Crossing one leg over the other, the Illusive Man tapped the end of his cigarette in an ashtray.

"You're not simply babysitting Shepard. This may turn out to be an extended mission, just like your last one. You know Shepard better than any of my other agents. I need you to assist him in his mission and monitor him."

The Illusive Man stubbed out his cigarette and his easygoing manner disappeared.

"Bringing Shepard back was a tremendous risk. I did it because I believed the stakes are too high not to take that risk. But if at any point you feel Shepard has become a liability to the ultimate objectives of the mission, I need you to do what you have to. You always do."

The Illusive Man leaned back in his chair and smiled. Miranda felt a chill run down her spine.

* * *

Miranda was going over the Illusive Man's intelligence on Freedom Progress when Shepard strode up the stairs that led to the communications centre.

"Not really the trusting type is he, your Illusive Man?"

Miranda didn't look up from her console. Shepard had no doubt encountered the holographic projection system the Illusive Man used for most of his face-to-face meetings. In all her time with Cerberus, even she had only been in the same room as the reclusive mastermind less than a dozen times.

"I would have thought you of all people would understand. You executed a number of high level assassinations as an N7 operative and as a Spectre. It would be irresponsible of the Illusive Man _not_ to take certain precautions." She deliberately avoided looking at him. "Nonetheless, the Illusive Man is very impressed with you. I'm eager to see if you can live up to his expectations on this mission."

Shepard crossed his arms.

"I can't have anyone disobeying my commands when we get there."

Miranda had been a bit peeved to learn Shepard had been put in charge of the mission. Although she could still technically override him if she felt it necessary, in practice she would be reporting to him as the leader of this mission. _Seems I can't completely conceal my frustration. _

"I know who I report to. As long as you don't do anything to betray Cerberus, I'll follow your orders."

"What the matter, Lawson? Worried you're not his favourite anymore?"

Stopping her work at the console, Miranda looked up at Shepard and gave him a polite smile.

"I've proven my value to the Illusive Man. Let's hope you're able to do the same."

Shepard cold grey eyes narrowed at the challenge.

"Are you naturally this bitchy, or is it just me?"

For a moment, Miranda almost lost her composure. _Who the hell does he think he is? _She had hoped Shepard would surprise her but it seemed he fit the stereotype of a patriarchal Alliance officer perfectly. Just another insecure, misogynistic, control freak unable to accept that not everyone would snap to attention when he demanded it. _Who does that remind me of? God, Shepard even smirks the same way he used to._

Although her cheeks flushed slightly, Miranda had had years to perfect her control over her emotions and she quickly recovered.

"I have the utmost respect for your abilities, Shepard. It's your motivations that concern me. I believe in what Cerberus stands for. Only time will tell if you prove to be an asset or a liability to our cause."

If Shepard had been expecting a more emotional reaction, he didn't show it.

"What do we know about this colony we're going to?"

"You were sent all the intelligence I was. It's in your omnitool."

Miranda was hardly in the mood to brief Shepard on intelligence he should have been reading himself and she had decided to let him know it. _We might have to work together, but I'm not here to do his work for him. _

"As I understand it, you're my executive officer on this mission. Humour me."

Miranda gritted her teeth. "Freedom's Progress is a typical human settlement in the Terminus Systems. They had a small military force for protection, supplemented by mechs and security drones. Average in almost every respect and completely unremarkable until the disappearance of its entire population."

Shepard gave her a smile and a pat on the arm. "That wasn't so hard, was it, Lawson?"

Turning to Jacob, he waved his hand in the air in a circle.

"Come on Taylor, we're moving out. Mount up!"

When she was sure Shepard wasn't looking, Miranda shook her head. She would have to have a discussion with the Illusive Man about this. She was willing to do many things for Cerberus. Working under this tactless idiot was asking too much.

* * *

Shepard stood in the darkened room, examining a deep gash in one of his shoulder pads where a stray round had gouged a trench into his armour. Seeing Tali'Zorah on Freedom's Progress had reminded him it had been two whole years since the destruction of the Normandy. For him, returning to life had been like awakening from a bad dream but for the rest of the galaxy, life had gone on. It had been something he had been aware of on a superficial level, but running into Tali had finally made it real to him.

Brushing away the thin film of dust that coated his face, Shepard watched as the holographic projectors rematerialized his image in front of the Illusive Man.

"Shepard. Good work on Freedom's Progress. The quarians forwarded their findings from Veetor's debriefing. No new data, but it's a surprising olive branch, given our history. You and I have different methods, but I can't argue with your results."

The image created by the holographic projectors flickered slightly. Shepard was no tech specialist, but based on what the instructors had taught him back at the Academy, the flickering meant one of two things: either the distance the image was being transmitted over was very great or the equipment was substandard. Based on what he had seen of Cerberus thus far, he doubted it was the latter.

"Not every negotiation has to take place behind the barrel of a gun. Diplomacy can sometimes achieve what force can't."

The Illusive Man smiled. For some reason that Shepard couldn't place, that only succeeded in making him appear less human

"Diplomacy is great when it works, but difficult when everyone already perceives you as a threat."

The Illusive Man took a long drag on his cigarette and Shepard suddenly realized how badly he was craving one. _When was the last time I had one?_ It had probably been on the _Normandy_, putting together that mission report after a run-in with a band of turian smugglers. He remembered that moment because Chief Williams had stuck her head in the door, asking him if he wanted in on an impromptu poker game a few of the crew had started in the cargo bay.

The Normandy had had a good crew but he'd never gotten very close to any of them. He'd always made an attempt to get to know each of them, checking in routinely to discuss personal matters but that had been as part of his job as their commanding officer, ensuring they didn't get wound up too tight to do their jobs. Strangely, he'd always gravitated more towards his nonhuman crewmembers, perhaps because he'd felt the cultural barriers provided a kind of emotional buffer that kept their interactions at a comfortable distance - warm, but not overly personal.

"More importantly, you confirmed the Collectors are behind the abductions."

Shepard realized he had temporarily zoned out and chastised himself for it. Letting down his guard or displaying weakness in his present company could be a potentially fatal mistake. _Nicotine withdrawal's starting to get to me. I wonder if anybody on this station smokes?_

He promised himself he'd find a cigarette the next time he had a chance.

"Why do I get the feeling you knew about them already?"

"I had my suspicions but I needed proof. The Collectors are enigmatic at best. They periodically travel to the Terminus Systems, looking to gather seemingly unimportant items or specimens. Usually in exchange for their technology. When their transactions are complete, they disappear as quickly as they arrived; back beyond the unmapped Omega 4 relay."

The Omega 4 relay had a dark reputation, somewhat like the old Bermuda Triangle back on Earth. The first time he'd seen it, Shepard had been a freshly minted lieutenant on the frigate _SSV Granicus_, passing through the Omega system on a long range reconnaissance patrol. Upon receiving the proximity transmissions from the warning beacons emplaced all around the relay, Captain Jamison had immediately ordered the helmsman to take a long detour, giving the infamous landmark a wide berth. Unlike the Bermuda Triangle, the Omega 4 relay was no myth. Few ships disappeared in its vicinity anymore, but that was because few captains dared even approach the general area.

"You didn't bring me back to chase ghosts and rumours. What do the Collectors have to do with the Reapers?"

"The Collectors have never targeted a single species before. And the previous sample sizes were in the dozens. Not the tens of thousands. The patterns are there, buried in the data."

Shepard drew the connection immediately. "Every colony hit has been within three days travel of the old Prothean beacon network."

The Illusive Man looked surprised."I'm impressed. I didn't realize Miranda had briefed you on that data yet."

Shepard couldn't remember how many nights he'd fallen asleep at his desk on the Normandy, trying to correlate the information implanted in his mind by the beacons and the Conduit with data he'd taken from Vigil, the Prothean VI. The Reapers had been methodical in dismantling the Prothean Empire, working their way outward from the core worlds in concentric circles, always following the most efficient path as would be expected from a race of sentient machines. The pattern of attacks on human colonies hadn't quite been as predictable, but when the Illusive Man mentioned patterns, the similarities become apparent.

"The Council and the Alliance want to believe the Reaper threat died with Sovereign. You and I know better. I won't wait until the Reapers are on the march. We need to take the fight to them. That's where you come in."

Shepard kept his expression neutral. It felt strange to have someone with the resources to help him finally say those words, after he'd lobbied the Citadel Council and Alliance to take the threat seriously for almost a year.

Fate, or whatever force it was that decided these things, certainly had a strange sense of humour. That it would be Cerberus, that most elusive and dangerous of old foes, that would become his only allies. He'd spent a good portion of his time as an N7 and later as a Spectre trying to hunt them down but in the end it had been they that had found him.

"If this is a war, I'll need an army. Or a really good team."

The Illusive Man leaned over a holographic console mounted on his armrest.

"I've already compiled a list of soldiers, scientists, and mercenaries. You'll get dossiers on the best of them. Finding them and convincing them to work with you could be challenging, but you're a natural leader."

Freelancers. Potentially dangerous, potentially volatile, but potentially extremely effective. _And ultimately expendable_, Shepard thought to himself. He pulled up the list and glanced over it. He recognized few of the names. The few he did know, he knew mostly by reputation.

"I'll continue to track the Collectors. When they make their next appearance, I'll notify you and your team. Be ready."

The Illusive Man put out his cigarette and flicked it into an ash tray.

"What happened to my old team?"

"You've been gone a long time. Things have changed. Most of them have moved on... or their allegiances have changed."

A part of Shepard strangely felt relieved. As a young officer singled out by the upper brass for his potential early in his career, he'd been assigned few long term postings. It allowed for few strong bonds to develop with his subordinates and colleagues but it had suited him. He'd quickly mastered the skill of familiarizing himself with a new command and earning their trust in a very small amount of time.

"I've got a ship and crew awaiting you already. A few of them you may recognize. But if I may offer a suggestion?"

Shepard looked at the Illusive Man suspiciously.

"Head to Omega first and find Mordin Solus. He's a brilliant salarian scientist. Our intelligence suggests he may know how to counteract the Collectors' paralyzing seeker swarms."

"Is that all?" Shepard asked, sensing the Illusive Man wasn't finished with him yet.

"Just one more thing. This is a high risk operation. There will be casualties and people will die. Can you accept that?"

Shepard closed his eyes.

"Yes."

* * *

If Miranda had been annoyed with Shepard before, now she was furious. _For once we catch a break and find an actual eyewitness and he goes and hands him over for nothing. Idiot! _All they had left to show for the mission was an omnitool with the musings of an insane quarian recorded on it and the vague promise of Shepard's old crewmate that she would forward any additional intelligence the Migrant Fleet recovered in the future.

The Illusive Man looked surprised to see her as she established the holographic link. "This had better be urgent, Miranda. I'm working on a number of other projects, all of which require my close attention."

Miranda put her hands on her hips.

"I did what you asked. I took him to the colony and gathered what intelligence I could. We would have gotten more but he insisted on releasing that quarian back to the Migrant Fleet. The man is a complete and utter moron. I request reassignment to another project effective immediately."

The surprised look on the Illusive Man's face turned to displeasure.

"I'm not sure I would have done the same, but Shepard made the right call. The recordings on the Quarians' omnitool were surprisingly informative and we've already begun receiving additional intelligence from the Migrant Fleet."

Miranda furrowed her brow.

"He's a liability. His performance has proven unsatisfactory, he is completely unpredictable and he's an overemotional idealist."

The Illusive Man looked amused. Miranda wasn't sure why, but she suddenly preferred his displeased expression.

"I disagree. I reviewed Operative Taylor's mission report. Commander Shepard is an exemplary marksman and a very experienced soldier. I expected nothing less. He's a Spectre and a former N7. Are you sure your judgment hasn't been compromised by your personal interactions with him?"

Swivelling in his chair, the Illusive Man played back a recording of her conversation with Shepard before the mission.

"He's a control freak with misogynistic tendencies attempting to hide deep insecurities through an obsessive need to assert his dominance," Miranda protested. The Illusive Man stopped the recording.

"No, he's a calculating tactician who used a probing attack to test your defences. You're a difficult target due to your experience as a field agent so he chose to go after your one vulnerability: your pride. He was testing you, experimenting to see if he could provoke a response. Judging from your reaction, it appears he succeeded."

The Illusive Man put a cigarette between his lips and lit it.

"You're one of my most capable agents, Miranda. I give you the most important assignments because I know you won't disappoint me. You can handle Shepard. You know him better than anyone else in my organization. If you'd still like reassignment, I can arrange that but I still believe you're my best agent for this mission and I know you can see it through to completion."

Miranda knew she was being manipulated but she couldn't resist it. Shepard had outsmarted her and she needed another chance to meet his challenge.

"Reassignment won't be necessary. I'll take the mission with Shepard."

The Illusive Man nodded approvingly but left her with a warning.

"You made the mistake of underestimating him. Don't allow it to happen again. Shepard is far more than what he appears."

With that the Illusive Man cut the link. Miranda straightened the collar of her bodysuit and left the communications centre. Shepard wouldn't catch her offguard so easily the next time.


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Miranda settled into her new office on the _Normandy _quickly. It wasn't an overly luxurious space, but it would suffice for her purposes. Compared to most of the military ships she'd been on, her office was actually larger than the cabins of most ship captains. It incorporated a living space with a bed, a work area, and even a sitting area with a couch and a few chairs. The only thing it really lacked was a private bathroom. It was a minor oversight, but she could survive despite the inconvenience of having to use the common bathrooms located at the other end of the crew deck.

Placing a small picture of the Sydney skyline on her desk, she turned on a Paganini recording and entered her network access into her work console. The photo didn't mean anything, but she had read that adding small personal touches made a huge difference in making subordinates and colleagues feel comfortable.

As she composed a preliminary report for the Illusive Man, she thought back to what he had said about Shepard. He had been different since returning from Freedom's Progress, far less confrontational.

He had taken the time to tour the ship and get to know the crew, inquiring about their personal responsibilities and feelings about the mission. He seemed to have a gift at making others feel at ease and open up to him and if Miranda hadn't known better, she would have thought it was natural.

In truth, the man was simply an excellent actor. The clues were well-hidden, but they were there. The way he subtly avoided direct eye contact without allowing others to realize it, the way he always made sure to guide conversation in a way that maintained an emotional distance between himself and the other person, they were hints that only someone with her unique blend of intelligence and field experience could pick up on.

Even Jacob had been fooled. Shepard had broken him down by exploiting their common experiences in the Alliance military. Miranda knew that Jacob still sometimes missed the structure, predictability, and black and white morality of the Alliance and it seemed Shepard had noticed it as well.

Secretly, she envied Shepard. He might have been acting, but he was good at it. Gaining the trust of her subordinates had never been something she was good at, no matter how hard she tried to emulate the same kind of techniques Shepard took to so naturally. There was something more that he had and she didn't, some intangible quality she couldn't quite place.

Shepard's attitude towards her had also changed. He was now treating her in a polite, professional manner, even agreeing with her when she suggested they pursue Mordin Solus first. Miranda wasn't sure if she preferred the new Shepard. Had he changed his approach with her because he realized his old methods didn't work? Or was he simply moving on because he had gotten everything he wanted, as the Illusive Man had suggested? A knock on her door interrupted her thoughts. Miranda turned off her music.

"Come."

As she looked up, Shepard walked into her office, dressed simply in nonstandard black combat trousers and a matching t-shirt. Just under the sleeve on his left arm, she could barely make out the faint outline of what had once been a tattoo of a trident-like symbol enclosed within a circle. There had been an inscription below the circle once, but it was completely indecipherable. _A regimental crest maybe? _It was not unheard of for Alliance operatives to remove such identifying marks before an operation and it appeared this had been what happened here. She'd noticed it before too, during his physical reconstruction but despite looking into his personal history, she'd never found out what it meant. While directing the Lazarus Project, she'd read up on everything she could about the man but much of his personal history was frustratingly vague or nonexistent. She could recite most of his missions by heart, as well as the tactical decisions he'd made but not his rationale for making them. Even with all the data Cerberus had gleaned, Shepard the man was still very much an unknown.

Shepard stood in her doorway for a moment, seeming to take in her room before speaking.

"Cerberus has some different ideas about crew amenities than the Alliance, but I can't say I disapprove."

Miranda finished her report and sent it off.

"We do what we can to make our personnel comfortable. What can I do for you, Commander?"

"I finished inspecting the ship and the crew. They seem competent and morale seems good. Some of them are a little friendlier and more informal than what I'm used to, but I'll manage."

She smiled politely and nodded.

"You've met Yeoman Chambers, I take it? She tells me you picked up some personal items earlier today when we stopped at New Brittany today."

The packages had been sealed when they arrived, making it impossible for her to snoop without Shepard knowing, but she'd quickly found out what they contained when he opened them in his quarters. He had left most of the bugs in the captain's quarters, removing only the audio bug from his bathroom. With his training, he no doubt knew Cerberus was watching him but for some reason he had done nothing to prevent that. A part of her wondered if he'd sealed his personal effects only to annoy her. What he had pulled from the packages had been frustratingly uninformative. Some customized equipment and weaponry, a change of clothes, nothing that could tell her anything new. The most personal item he'd ordered in was a crate of Johnny Walker Black label scotch whiskey but Cerberus' file on him had already determined that he drank heavily on occasion.

"I had some personal preferences that Cerberus didn't consider. Do you have a moment, Miranda?"

Miranda gestured to a seat facing her desk.

"I'd like to apologize for some of the things I said before the mission on Freedom's Progress. I'd just been resurrected from the dead, your Illusive Man informed me the galaxy was still in danger of falling to the Reapers, and I hadn't had a cigarette for over two years."

Miranda congratulated herself on screening a half dozen cartons of cigarettes Shepard had attempted to have delivered to the _Normandy_. She'd hated the smell since she'd been a young girl and there was no telling what effect they might have on the fresh new tissue of Shepard's reconstructed lungs. She made a mental note to ask Dr. Chakwas to order in some quitting aids. _The last thing I need is the man we're counting on to save the galaxy going insane because I forced him to quit cold turkey. _

"Under normal circumstances, I would likely be working against Cerberus but for this mission at least, we have to work together. So, can I trust you not to poison my coffee?"

Shepard had extended his hand over her desk. Miranda hesitated for a moment, then arched an eyebrow and took his outstretched hand.

"I suppose I can resist. Although if I were to poison you, I'd be far more likely to slip something into your scotch."

Shepard chuckled.

"I guess I had that coming. Now that we've agreed to work together though, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself? You are my XO, after all."

Miranda was sure Shepard was attempting his charm tactics on her, but at least he was making an effort to repair their strained relationship. She decided to throw him a bone for his efforts.

"I guess that's fair, I've spent the last two years learning everything there is to learn about you."

Turning off her console, she got up and walked out from behind her desk.

"Well, you should probably know that I've had extensive genetic modification. Not my decision, but I make the most of it. It's one of the reasons the Illusive Man handpicked me. I'm very good at just about anything I choose to do."

"You certainly don't lack for confidence."

Miranda shrugged.

"It's just a fact. My reflexes, my strength, even my looks – they're all designed to give me an edge. No point in hiding from it."

Shepard leaned back in his chair, letting one arm rest on its backrest. Miranda continued.

"It's the reason I'm trusted to oversee the most dangerous, risky, and technically demanding operations Cerberus undertakes."

She paused to look him directly in the eye. As she had expected, his eyes had actually been focused on a point slightly above hers.

"And it's why I was assigned to you. It's my job to make sure you succeed, Shepard."

Shepard allowed her to maintain eye contact for a brief moment before quickly breaking it off.

"What level of genetic modification are we talking about?"

Miranda crossed her arms.

"It's very thorough. Physically, I'm superior in many ways. I heal quickly and I'll likely live half again as long as the average human. My biotic abilities are also very advanced... for a human. Add to that some of the best training and education money can buy and well, it's pretty impressive, really."

Shepard chuckled again. His laugh was contagious, and Miranda could see how he was able to draw people to him. Even in a room with a hundred people, he would never disappear into the background.

"Sounds like you were designed to be perfect."

Miranda shook her head.

"Maybe, but I'm not. I'm still human, Shepard. I make mistakes like everyone else. And when I do, the consequences are severe. Everyone expects a lot from someone with my... abilities."

The grin briefly disappeared from Shepard's face.

"It's hard sometimes, having that kind of responsibility on your shoulders."

For a moment, Miranda thought she saw him let his guard down, a look in his eye that she would have read as sympathy if she didn't know better. The smile returned and the shield went back up.

"Thanks for the information, Miranda. I'll talk to you later."

Miranda allowed herself a smile and was surprised to see what looked like genuine warmth appear on Shepard's face in return.

"Of course, Commander. Whatever you need."

As soon as the door hissed closed behind him, the smile disappeared from Miranda's face. Since he had first laid eyes on her, Shepard had shown virtually no reaction to her physical appearance. It was something Miranda wasn't used to. She had written it off before as his being distracted by first the shock of being brought back, then the need to focus on fighting on Freedom's Progress, but even when he had been in her room, talking casually with her in a relaxed setting, his eyes had never strayed from her face nor given any indication of his interest in her as anything more than a conversational partner.

It bothered her. She told herself it was because it meant she could not manipulate him in the same way she could manipulate most men but she knew she was being dishonest. The truth was that Shepard intrigued her. He wasn't classically handsome but he had an interesting face that appealed to her, the old battle scars that broke up the straight lines of his jawline and high cheekbones seeming to add character. His deep grey eyes reminded her of a trip she had taken as a child to Scotland, where she had seen the haunting beauty of the North Atlantic, relentless and unyielding as it pounded against the seashore. But those eyes hid secrets. She had briefly gotten past his defences but he'd quickly closed the opening. Understanding Shepard would be a challenge. And the one thing Miranda Lawson could never resist was a challenge.

* * *

Shepard left Miranda's office unsure of how he really felt about her being assigned as his XO. It should have concerned him that the Illusive Man was sending her along as much to spy on him as assist him but a part of him was pleased it was her he would be working with. Miranda was formidable, but he'd already proven he could get her off balance before. The same might not be true of a new handler. _Maybe it doesn't have to come to that. _She was obviously capable and the resentment he'd sensed from her before at his having been put in charge of their mission seemed to be constrained, even if it hadn't completely disappeared. The smile she'd given him before he left her office had even been real. As long as he kept an eye on her, they might even be able to cooperate.

Shepard brushed past a crewman on his way to the lift. The ship Cerberus had built for him was oddly familiar yet completely unlike any military vessel he had ever served on. What had first struck him about it was its size. Even seen from an observation deck overlooking the hanger bay, its length and mass were obvious. Despite the increased size though, the long, smooth lines were unmistakable. It was like someone had taken the old _Normandy_ SR-1's design plans and doubled every measurement. According to Joker, that had been exactly what happened. When pressed as to how Cerberus had been able to acquire the blueprints for the most advanced warship in the Alliance Navy however, the helmsman had just shrugged and continued to gush about the new ship's capabilities.

The ship had initially remained unnamed, retaining only the designation "SR-2" as its moniker. At Joker's insistence however, the ship had been rechristened "_Normandy_", after its ill-fated predecessor. Stepping out of the elevator, Shepard was immediately struck by the smell of drying paint; Joker had made sure that the ship's new name had been stencilled in everywhere alongside the ubiquitous Cerberus emblem.

"Officer on deck!"

Shepard nodded to Jacob in acknowledgment. It seemed old habits died hard, as the Cerberus agent was saluting him.

The new _Normandy_'s interior, like its exterior, was much larger than its namesake. The layout remained the same, retaining that old peculiar turian setup with the CIC located near the rear. What was immediately apparent was that more provisions had been made for crew comfort. The seats were properly padded with what looked to be real leather, not the cheap military-grade plastic Shepard had grown far too used to in his time with the marines. The larger dimensions of the new ship meant its interior was much more spacious as well. All in all, it wasn't an exact copy of the old Normandy but it was a reasonable imitation and Shepard had a feeling he could get used to the changes. Climbing onto the command platform overlooking the holographic galaxy map in the middle of the CIC, Shepard allowed himself a genuine smile for the first time since he'd been brought back.

It was as Joker said. _It's good to be home. _


	7. Chapter 6

A/N: I've fleshed out the organization Shepard used to work for a bit in this chapter and to preserve continuity, I've retconned bits of Chapter 1 and 2 to make it fit. This entire chapter is a flashback.

**Chapter 6**

_Five years ago_

"Damn politicians."

Shepard watched as Admiral Cullen emptied his pistol into the holographic image of a batarian raider. Cullen loaded another thermal clip into his pistol and called up another target with his omnitool. _Another batarian. It's always a batarian_. Shepard didn't think he'd ever seen the Admiral select anything else, despite the ability of the firing range's sophisticated VI to generate a fully articulated holographic target of any conceivable adversary a marine might have to face.

"The Council wants us to make nice with the batarians. Have a little 'meeting of the minds' with them to discuss our 'differences in opinion'."

Again, the holographic batarian was peppered with a barrage of mass accelerated rounds to its face and upper torso, its simulated blood fountaining as a round went through one of its eyes. Admiral Cullen might be getting up there in age, but he could still outshoot most of his subordinates, even if he couldn't quite keep up with them anymore in their daily physical workouts.

"They say it's essential to 'galactic peace and stability' that we keep a lid on things with the batarians out in the Terminus. The reality is they're too afraid to confront the batarians openly. They want us to pretend we accept the Hegemony's story that they're unconnected to the pirate raids on our border colonies... even though all the slaves the pirates take end up back on the batarian core worlds."

Admiral Cullen's jaw muscles noticeably tightened.

"What we should really be doing is sending the Arcturus fleet in and take the fight to the squint bastards. Give them a beating so bad that their grandchildren will still be talking about it. But that's obviously not an option." Cullen sighed and nodded towards a crate of thermal clips. "But that doesn't mean we're going to do nothing. The Epsilon Program was created specifically for situations like these, to do the necessary things quietly when no else can."

Shepard handed his superior a fresh thermal clip from the crate.

"Sir?"

"The meeting's supposed to take place in three weeks. The batarians don't trust us and we don't trust them so some asari crimeboss offered to let them hold it on Omega. Claims she can keep an eye on both parties and keep things from getting out of hand. The pukes in the diplomatic core thought that sounded like a good idea and accepted the offer." Admiral Cullen fired a few shots and then lowered his pistol. "The asari's going to get paid well for this. She'll also be able to use the opportunity to observe the negotiations firsthand and maybe even tip them to give her a... competitive edge. It's a no-win for us though. Normally I'd send those idiots an 'are you fucking kidding me' warning message but I think we might have an opportunity here to send a message to those damned four-eyed squints instead."

Cullen put away his pistol and walked towards the exit, gesturing for Shepard to walk with him. The older officer didn't say anything more until they'd reached his aircar, where he motioned for Shepard to get in. As the engines whined to life, Cullen finally resumed speaking. _Old bastard doesn't want anyone else to hear this part of the conversation. ____Shepard straightened with interest._

"Chorn Kel'merah, a high-ranking officer in the batarian Special Intervention Unit, will be there. Kel'merah also happens to be the liaison officer between the Batarian Hegemony and some of the most notorious pirate and slaver gangs in the Terminus. Rumour has it he used to be a slaver himself and may have helped plan and lead some of the larger raids including..." Cullen looked Shepard right in the eye, "... the one on Mindoir."

Shepard felt his blood run cold. The memories of that night came flooding back and for a moment he could hear the screams and taste the blood again. He blinked hard, forcing the nightmare back into the shadows of his mind. _You're manipulating me with the memory of Mindoir, you miserable son of a bitch. _

Nice recall.

A small voice in his head was telling him just to get out of the car, to let Cullen find another pawn to do his dirty work. A much louder voice told him he could finally exact his revenge against one of the ones responsible for robbing him of everything he had ever held dear. Emotion won over reason.

"You want me to kill him," Shepard said, slowly opening his eyes. Admiral Cullen shook his head.

"Not just him. Nobody in the batarian party gets off Omega alive. The parties will be small, probably two or three officers per side plus security. Intel suggests the batarians will be sending Kel'merah and a member of the Batarian Hegemony's ruling council. Taking out Kel'merah will cripple the Hegemony's ability to coordinate its activities in the Terminus." Cullen pulled one of his omnipresent cigars from a pocket inside his coat and lit it. "Killing a member of the Batarian Hegemony's political elite will send a message to the Hegemony and the rest of the galaxy: Humanity will do _whatever it takes_ to safeguard its interests."

"Backup?" Shepard asked, knowing the answer before the word had left his mouth. Cullen shook his head again.

"This is an unsanctioned mission. Nobody outside this car even knows this discussion took place. Screw up and the Alliance will deny you even exist."

_So business as usual then. _Admiral Cullen pulled out an optical storage device. "The mission details are on here."

Shepard took the OSD and slipped it into his coat. As he turned to get out of the car, he felt Admiral Cullen grab his arm.

"This one's not going to be easy, Shepard. Good luck."

* * *

The room smelled like despair. There was really no other way to describe it. _Feels like the walls are closing in_. The small room Shepard had rented was on the top floor of a rundown building located a few streets away from a busy marketplace. Close enough that he could use the cover of the crowds to mask his presence from unwelcome eyes when he left his apartment but far enough that he'd be able to pick out a tail easily on his way back. Now he just had to find his quarry.

Shepard laughed bitterly to himself. _Easier said than done_.

Both the Alliance and the Batarian Hegemony had kept plans for the talks secret, and none of the information brokers he had approached for help seemed to know anything useful. Several of them hadn't even known a meeting was going to take place at all. One of them had even offered _Shepard_ payment for the information.

Attempts to find out more about the asari crimeboss Cullen had mentioned had also come to naught. All Shepard had gotten was a name - Aria T'Loak. When pressed for information, a shady looking salarian broker had offered up a moniker – the Pirate Queen of Omega - before scurrying back into the shadows, as if the very mention of Aria's name could summon the asari's assassins to the speaker's location. _Three days left, then this mission is a wash. _

Shepard decided to try going over the logs of ships flying into Omega's major spaceports again but doubted he'd find anything. _That would just be too easy. _With no official government, recordkeeping on the station was unreliable and incomplete at best and completely nonexistent at its worst.

Just as Shepard was about to fire up his VI console, the surveillance monitor he had hooked up beside his cot beeped. A tiny pin-sized camera he had carefully placed in the doorway of his building had picked something up. A krogan, a turian, and two batarians, all of them well armed and clad in combat armour, were making their way up towards the entrance. _How the hell did I not notice them before? _Cameras strategically emplaced along the two streets leading out of the market to his building should have picked them up long before they'd gotten as far as they had. He realized too late what had happened. Omega had dulled his senses. He'd gotten so used to the sight of heavily armed gangs patrolling the streets that seeing yet another armed group of aliens had failed to attract his attention.

Flipping his cot over, Shepard grabbed a heavily modified Armax Arsenal combat shotgun and watched the aliens' progress on the surveillance monitor. When the quartet reached his room, one of the batarians walked up and pounded on his door.

"We know you're in there, human! Open up!"

Shepard glanced at his window, wondering if he'd be able to escape through there. _Seven stories... probably not. _He'd have to fight his way out. Taking a deep breath, he switched off the safety on his shotgun and leaned against the door. At such a close range, the highly illegal modified tungsten pellets could cause horrific damage to an unshielded target and possibly even burn out kinetic barriers. Placing the barrel against his flimsy metal door, he was about to pull the trigger when something made him stop. _Why did they knock? _If they were here to kill him, they would have just kicked in the door and hosed him down with automatic fire. Heart pounding in his chest, Shepard kept his shotgun pressed against the door and slowly eased it open. _Even if I'm wrong, I can still get the jump on these guys._

"Yeah? What do you want?" he asked, trying his best to sound casual and unconcerned.

"Aria wants to know why a human is nosing around asking so many questions about her. We're here to bring you in to explain yourself."

_So they're messengers. Judging by the number of them though, that probably wasn't a request. _Shepard silently flicked the safety of his shotgun back on and tossed it on his cot. _Wherever they're taking me, I doubt having it with me would do much good. _He threw on his jacket and opened the door.

"Let's not keep your boss waiting, then."

* * *

The moment Shepard cast his eyes upon the lithe asari lounging on the couch in one of the private rooms on the top floor of the Afterlife nightclub, he knew this was the infamous Aria T'Loak. He had never been a xenophile, but there was something very alluring about this particular asari.

Her outfit left very little to imagination, revealing just enough of her magnificent curves and toned muscles to allow his imagination to run wild filling in the rest. Her supple skin was a warm purple, a colour he had never seen on an asari before. Her lips were curled into a sensual smile but it was her eyes that caught his attention. They were a beautiful azure colour, bewitching in the way they seemed to sparkle, yet there was a cold cruelty in their depths that filled him with both dread and desire.

"He's taller than you described him, Anto," she said, her voice warm and velvety. The batarian who had first knocked on his door looked like he wanted to say something but she waved him away.

"Leave us." Anto hurriedly backed out of the room, sliding the door shut as he did so.

"Ms. T'Loak, my name is..." Shepard began but the asari cut him off.

"I know who you are, Commander Shepard. I also already know why you're here. Wine?"

Shepard shook his head but immediately regretted it. _Is it considered an insult to refuse when an asari offers you a drink? _To his relief, Aria didn't seem to take offence as she simply shrugged.

"I have it imported specially from Thessia. Each bottle costs more than you'll make in a decade of working for the Alliance."

Shepard swallowed once to clear his head before speaking. The asari was wearing some sort of perfume that was making him dizzy, despite the olfactory filters he had been implanted with.

"If you already know my purpose for coming to Omega, why did your man say..."

Again Aria cut him off. _Normally that pisses me off but why does it seem okay when she does it?_

"I trust Anto's discretion more than that of most of my employees, but trust is a relative term on Omega. I had you brought to me because I believe we might be able to help each other. As for how I know so much about you and your mission, John..." Aria paused momentarily and regarded him appraisingly with her mesmerizing blue eyes, "I've only survived for so long because I make it my business to know about everything and everyone of significance on my station."

Shepard blinked. _Did she really just call me by my first name? _It had been so long since he'd heard it that for a moment he'd thought she was addressing someone else.

"Ms. T'Loak..."

"Call me Aria."

"Aria," Shepard corrected himself, "What is it that you think I could help you with? If you're as well informed as you say you are, you already know my mission isn't going as planned."

Aria rose to her feet and walked over to the darkly tinted window overlooking the rest of the club. The way she moved reminded Shepard of some sort of predatory cat – graceful yet deadly. There was a lightness in her steps, a barely perceptible tension in her muscles that he had only seen once in his life when he had witnessed a unit of asari commandos in action.

"The meeting you've been sent to interrupt will be taking place in an abandoned missile silo on the lower levels of Omega. I can get you in, but once you've completed your mission you'll have to do something for me."

Shepard eyed Aria warily. "What do you want me to do?"

Aria finally turned her head back to look at him.

"When you're finished with the batarians, I want you to kill the Alliance negotiating team as well."

_Kill the Alliance negotiators? Why? _Shepard masked his confusion as best he could.

"Why do you want them dead?"

Aria poured herself another glass of wine and swirled it around for a moment.

"One of the Alliance negotiators met with an information broker shortly after he arrived on Omega and purchased an OSD. That OSD contains information about some of my past activities that I'd rather the Alliance not get their hands on. My people covertly searched the apartment the Alliance negotiators are staying in but couldn't find it. There's also been no evidence the data was transmitted offworld. That likely means whoever purchased that OSD is carrying it on their body for safekeeping."

"And you have no idea which negotiator has the OSD so you want me to kill all of them just to be sure."

"Precisely," Aria said, taking a sip from her glass.

"What's keeping me from taking the OSD for myself or making a copy? I work for the Alliance too."

The asari settled back in her seat and crossed her arms.

"I'll have to recover the OSD and hand it over to you," Shepard said, answering his own question.

Aria smiled. "You're smarter you look. Anto underestimated you."

"And if it's not there?" Shepard rubbed his forehead, trying to clear his senses. Aria's perfume was seriously starting to affect him.

"Kill them anyways. My people will find it eventually." Despite the temperature in the room being turned up, Shepard suddenly felt very cold. The casual manner in which Aria could order the deaths of others chilled him to the bone. A little voice in his head reminded him that he had carried out similar orders from Cullen without any hesitation but he quickly silenced it by pouring himself a glass of Aria's wine. The asari arched an eyebrow but didn't comment.

"One last question."

"Hmmm?" Aria purred.

"Why me? You have men. Why don't you send them to do the job?"

Aria looked surprised at the question.

"The Alliance and the batarians are watching me. I can't betray them without their knowing it. I could hire a freelance assassin but any assassin skilled enough to do the job is also infamous enough to bring unwanted attention." Aria's eyes captured his and he found he couldn't look away. "But you, you're a complete unknown. A faceless killer working for a shadowy unit in the Alliance military that doesn't officially exist."

Aria leaned in towards him, a strange smile he couldn't quite read flitting over her face.

"And I'm familiar with some of your work, John. You're so... thorough. I don't have anyone on my payroll quite like you."

"I'll uh... take that as a compliment," Shepard managed to stammer. _What's wrong with me? _He felt like he was drunk but he'd only taken a few sips of Aria's wine. _How potent can it be? Asari can't be much tougher than humans, can they? _

"So you'll agree to help me?" Aria asked. Shepard felt himself nod but couldn't remember telling his body to do so.

"Good. Now that we've gotten the business out of the way, perhaps we can move onto the more... stimulating part of our meeting."

Aria smiled sensually and slinked slowly towards him, undoing the top strap of her formfitting bodice with one hand as she placed the other on his chest. Shepard could hear his heart pounding in his head as he half-heartedly resisted.

"Aria, maybe this isn't..."

"Shhh..." she shushed him, pressing her glistening lips against his, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth. His body seemingly acting of its own accord, Shepard wrapped the asari in his arms and ravenously returned her kiss.

Gasping for breath when she finally unlocked her lips from his, he noticed her hands suddenly flare with a quick burst of biotic power and he was suddenly thrown backwards onto the couch.

"Relax, John. Let me enjoy this."

Aria undid the rest of the straps holding her bodice closed. Straddling his lap, she placed her hands on both sides of his head and pressed her forehead to his.

"Embrace... _eternity_!"

* * *

Shepard staggered into his apartment and slumped onto his cot. His head was pounding and he felt drained, physically and mentally. His body was crying for sleep but there was one last thing he had to do before he could grant it its wish. He opened a fixed FTL communications link to an encrypted frequency he had been given shortly before arriving on Omega.

A grainy holographic image appeared on his console.

"What is it, Shepard?" Admiral Cullen asked.

"There's something we should discuss," Shepard said and proceeded to recap what he could remember of his meeting with Aria. Cullen didn't interrupt, only nodding occasionally to show he was still listening. When Shepard finished, Cullen finally spoke.

"None of this affects the original mission objectives. Proceed with Aria's plan."

_Did I hear that right?_ Shepard leaned forward on his cot, unsure he had heard Cullen's orders correctly. "Sir, her 'plan' involves me wiping out our diplomatic team on Omega."

"If we can't hit the squints before the meeting, this is the only way. If anyone on the diplomatic team witnesses the op, this mission is a bust. Their deaths will be unfortunate but necessary. Acceptable losses."

Shepard looked at Cullen in disbelief. The older man stared back at him with hard, unblinking eyes.

"When I recruited you, I warned you that you would have to do things that seem to go against everything you've been conditioned to believe in. Our race is involved in a war for survival – a war we cannot afford to lose. I selected you specifically for this mission because I believe you know the stakes."

Gritting his teeth, Shepard slowly nodded. _Is this what I signed up for? Fratricide in the name of necessity?_

"Understood, sir."

"Good." Admiral Cullen paused and frowned. "Shepard, you didn't tell me everything that transpired in your meeting with Aria."

The memory of what Aria had done to him after their agreement brought his headache back in full force. _How the hell did he know?_

"What do you mean, sir?"

"Son, you look like shit and your eyes are wider than a FNG's on his first day in basic. What happened in that meeting?"

_What happened? I was raped and mindfucked by an asari she-devil!_

"After our conversation Aria... seduced me. We got uh... intimate and she did something with my head."

"Interesting. She melded with you," Cullen said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"Melded? As in mind melded? But why?"

"We've always known the asari have an unusual method of reproduction, but some of our eggheads have speculated that the asari mind meld can also be a means for mental conditioning and manipulation. I suspect some of our operatives have been affected this way, but none of them were ever able to remember it. Maybe your brain functions differently in some way." Cullen looked uncertain. "As for the why... Aria was probably attempting to break down any remaining doubts you might have about her proposal after you agreed to it. I suspect that if you'd turned her down, you wouldn't have left her place alive."

"And the... physical part of it?" The unnaturalness of what Aria had done to him still unnerved him and Shepard couldn't bring himself to call it _sex_. _But why does it bother me so much? It wasn't... unpleasant._

"Aria T'Loak is known to possess certain sexual fetishes that could probably explain it."

"Sexual fetishes? Towards humans?"

Cullen shook his head.

"Sex and power. She had you under her thrall and she used you. Be careful, Shepard. Aria has given us a way to complete the mission, but don't turn your back on her."

Shepard acknowledged the warning and Cullen cut the link. Leaning his shotgun against the head of his cot, he lay back and willed himself into a fitful sleep.

* * *

Shepard straightened his uniform and secured the Alliance issue Hahn-Kedar pistol hidden under his tunic. Wary of betrayal, the batarians had insisted on strict limitations on the personnel the Alliance could send and what kind of equipment they could bring into the meeting. No kinetic barriers, no ablative-armour hardsuits, no biotics, and no lethal weapons. _Not that their paranoia will make a difference this time. _

Satisfied that his disguise as a regular Alliance Marine was adequate to pass inspection, Shepard climbed out of the skycar and walked up to the nondescript apartment the Alliance negotiating team was staying in. He knocked on the door and answered the challenge with the pass phrase he had extracted from the Alliance Marine he'd kidnapped the night before.

_At least he died quickly. _Shepard hadn't tortured him. He'd simply knocked the unfortunate soldier out by drugging his drink and extracted the pass phrase for the day by administering a truth serum. The Marine had died peacefully, a cocktail of drugs putting him to sleep and shutting down his vital organs one by one.

_You've killed innocents before. Why does this one bother you so much? _He glanced at the Alliance insignia on the lapels of his stolen uniform and got his answer. _You've never killed one of your own before. _

The door opened and Shepard was greeted by a wary looking man dressed in the uniform of an Alliance Navy commander.

"What's your name, Marine, and what are you doing here? Where's Corporal Chaudhary?"

"I'm Service Chief Lee Sommers, sir. Corporal Chaudhary came down with a bad case of food poisoning and was evacuated. I was ordered to Omega to replace him."

Shepard saluted smartly and handed the commander the falsified medical report and transfer orders Aria's people had given him. The major scrutinized the datapad for a few moments before grudgingly handing it back to Shepard.

"Food poisoning. You gropos and your lack of discipline. I'll be filing a report with Chaudhary's superiors as soon as we get off this godforsaken rock." He turned and yelled into the apartment. "Evans! Get in here!"

A haggard-looking young man in his early twenties ran into the room and gave a sloppy salute. The commander glared at him for a moment, then looked back at Shepard.

"This is my aide, Lieutenant Evans. I don't have time to give you the rundown so he'll be briefing you." Without waiting for an acknowledgement from either Shepard or his aide, the commander disappeared into one of the rooms. Lieutenant Evans shrugged sympathetically.

"Commander Bucelli isn't normally like that." Evans chuckled to himself. "Well, actually he is and..."

The young lieutenant noticed Shepard looking oddly at him and cleared his throat. _I guess Bucelli wasn't exactly looking for the best and brightest while selecting an aide. _

"Right um... the briefing. Well, there's not much for you to do, since Commander Bucelli and Major Peluso will be doing all the talking. The way Commander Bucelli tells it, you gropos are mainly there just to fill out the numbers and impress the batarians. Nothing much to it."

"Understood, sir." Shepard responded blandly.

"It should be a boring few days of negotiations, then back to Alliance space for us. Uh... well, back to Alliance space for me, I'm not sure where your usual posting is. You're probably used to getting more exciting missions than escorting a bunch of desk jockeys like us, right Sommers?" Evans said, nudging Shepard in a joking manner with his elbow.

Shepard laughed politely. _You have no idea._

"If you say so, sir."

* * *

"... so I figured I'd get a law degree and move out to one of the new colonies. It's funny because my dad really wasn't crazy about the idea but my mom..."

_Thirty minute shuttle ride and the guy's already told me half his life story. _Lieutenant Evans seemed oblivious to Shepard's disinterest and kept talking.

"The recruiter told me the Alliance would pay for my education and that's what got me here. Why'd you join up, Sommers?"

The question caught Shepard off-guard but he quickly recovered. _The recruiter told me I could avenge my family by killing batarians and get paid for it. _"Family pushed me into it, sir."

"Ah, had a parent in the service?"

"Yeah, something like that," Shepard lied.

"It's not a bad life, but I'm probably not going to re-up when my term's over. My girlfriend's not crazy about all the travel. We only moved in together last spring but she's had to pick up and move twice already."

Evans pulled out a holo and leaned over to show Shepard, inadvertently jamming the butt of Shepard's pistol into the bottom of his ribcage. Shepard winced but managed to resist the urge to throttle the over-talkative lieutenant. More to placate Evans and get him to stop leaning on his sidearm than out of interest, Shepard looked at the holo.

Evans and his girlfriend were standing in front of one of the ubiquitous prefabricated habitats that covered every Alliance facility in the galaxy. The girl was pretty, but not really so attractive that he would have turned his head to look at her if he'd passed her on the street. _Why's she standing like that? _

"Your girlfriend... she's... she's pregnant?"

"Yep, she's due in eight weeks. I'm saving up my leave so I can spend some time with her and the little one when it arrives. When I get back I've got something special planned for her," Lieutenant Evans beamed.

_Family._ Shepard's looked across the shuttle at Bucelli and Peluso huddled over a dataslate, discussing final points for the opening negotiations. _They all have families. Families whose lives I'm about to shatter as thoroughly as the batarians shattered mine. _He didn't know why it had never occurred to him before.

_Focus on the mission. Sacrifices have to be made. _Humanizing targets was a rookie mistake. He hadn't made that mistake in a long time. _They're just targets. Eliminate them and move on. _The light lunch he'd had before the shuttle took off suddenly wasn't sitting so well in his stomach.

"Hey, what's the matter Sommers? Feeling sick?"

Evans shoved a motion sickness bag in front of him but Shepard waved it away.

"No, probably just something I ate. Alien food doesn't agree with me."

"Geez... first Chaudhary, now you. If I didn't know better I'd say the aliens are trying to kill us."

Shepard forced a laugh.

"Yeah... aliens. Can't trust'em."

* * *

Shepard stepped up to the makeshift security checkpoint Aria's people had set up just inside the entrance of the abandoned missile silo that would serve as the meeting place for the talks. Once a part of Omega's fixed defences back when the station was still a major mining operation, the abandoned silo was isolated and easy to defend. _And also impossible to escape from if an assassin managed to slip in. _

Looking around the area, Shepard noticed that there were no batarians amongst Aria's security. _Worried about mixed loyalties? _He held his arms out and allowed a salarian to scan him for weapons. Nobody else in the Alliance party seemed to notice the salarian had turned the scanner off before waving it over Shepard's body.

"Go on through," the salarian said brusquely. Shepard nodded and walked through the massive blast doors into the large chamber where a long table and several chairs had been set up. Finely honed instincts taking over, he immediately began scanning the room for possible escape routes and useable cover. To his satisfaction, the room was perfectly round, having once formed the base of the silo, and the only cover was the furniture, none of it thick enough to stop a mass accelerated round. There were a few vents set into the walls, but none of them low enough to reach from the ground and they were too small for anybody to climb through.

The batarian delegation came in through the doors. Shepard tried to identify them but it was difficult. _Batarians always look the same_. The asari, with their softer, more human-like features were relatively easy but more alien species like batarians and turians were always a challenge for humans to differentiate. _At least turians have facepaint. _Fortunately Kel'merah had a deep scar running across his brow ridge but the batarian counsellor had no such distinguishing marks. _No wonder Cullen wanted me to kill them all. It's impossible to tell them apart. _When they got closer, Shepard saw that two of the batarians were dressed identically in slightly less ornate uniforms. _Bodyguards. _

"They look like a cheerful bunch," Evans muttered but a look from Commander Bucelli shut him up. When salutations were exchanged, Shepard and the other Marine grunt were ignored, just as he'd expected. Being lowly security personnel, the batarians likely saw them as little more than furniture.

As the two parties sat down, Shepard took his place behind the Alliance side of the table beside the other Marine and started doing the math. _Four batarians, four Alliance. _His heavily modified pistol was good for only ten shots. After ten shots it would overheat and he wouldn't be able to use it for at least thirty seconds. In a situation like this where speed was the key, thirty seconds might as well have been thirty minutes. He would have to make every shot count. _Hand-to-hand takedown on the Marine, then hit the batarian grunts first or the HVTs? _The batarian bodyguards were already standing, meaning they would be able to react the quickest and were the greatest threat but if he was unlucky enough to be taken down himself before he could kill everyone, the batarian officers would escape. Aria's men had confiscated lethal weapons from both parties but the Marine and the batarian bodyguards were probably wearing non-lethal stunners. _Bodyguards first, then HVTs. Now about the Alliance personnel... _

The beeping of Evans' communicator distracted him from his thoughts. Evans frowned and pressed his comm bead to his ear.

"I'm sorry, there's something I have to attend to," he hastily apologized and got up to leave. Kel'merah stood up abruptly and barked something in batarian.

"Human treachery! If he is allowed to leave this meeting is over!" Shepard translated smoothly for Evans, noticing the lieutenant had forgotten to turn on his automatic translator. Bucelli and Peluso managed to calm the batarians down and Evans stepped out of the chamber.

_Damnit. Aria was supposed to seal the blast doors. _Sealing the blast doors after both parties had arrived had actually been the batarians' idea, ostensibly to keep the Alliance from bringing in more personnel to spring an ambush, but it would have made Shepard's job far easier as well. _Now if I can't find that OSD, I'll have to track down Evans. _

As the talks began without Evans, Shepard glanced out at the open blast doors periodically, hoping the lieutenant would return but when the blast doors belatedly closed half an hour later, he was forced to accept that Evans might not return until the meeting was over. _Let's get on with this then. _

Casually moving slightly behind the other Marine, Shepard suddenly snapped the man's neck. Using the limp body as a shield, he drew his pistol and dropped both batarian bodyguards. Kel'merah shoved his companion to the ground and reached for a stunner clipped to his belt.

"Assassin! I knew it! We should have..." The batarian never finished his sentence as a high calibre mass accelerated slug blew his head open.

"Sommers! What the hell are you doing?" Bucelli shouted as Shepard dispatched the batarian councillor. Bucelli's eyes widened as Shepard turned the gun in his direction but he had no time to react as Shepard shot him and Peluso in quick succession.

Replacing his pistol in its holster, Shepard was surprised by the sound of gunshots outside. As the blast doors slowly reopened, he saw one of Aria's thugs go down. Lieutenant Evans stepped over the body, wielding a shotgun in one hand and waving to Shepard with the other.

"Aria betrayed us, we've got to get out of here..." Evans stopped mid-sentence. "What happened..."

_Terrible timing, Evans. _Before Evans had time to fully take in the carnage, Shepard grabbed his shotgun and kneed him in the stomach. Discarding the shotgun, Shepard hauled the groaning lieutenant to his feet by his collar.

"Where's the OSD, Evans?" he demanded.

"You... you're working for Aria," Evans wheezed. His eyes hardened. "I hid it. You'll never find it."

Shepard drew his pistol and shot the man in the thigh. Evans screamed.

"I'm not going to ask again," Shepard warned menacingly.

"What are you going to do? Torture me?" Evans challenged, his tone defiant despite the tears filling his eyes.

Shepard blinked. He had the training to make Evans talk. Even without specialized equipment or chemicals, he could inflict such horrors upon the lieutenant that the man would be begging to die. _So what's stopping you? _Blood was starting to pool around the bodies of the dead Alliance officers, soaking into their navy blue uniform, turning them a deep purple. Their dead eyes stared lifelessly at him, questioning him. _Is this what you signed up for?_

"No," Shepard answered unsurely.

Evans laughed weakly. "So what now, Sommers? Are you going to hand me over to Aria? How much did she pay you to betray us?"

"I don't work for Aria," Shepard said quietly. "And my name isn't Sommers."

A look of confusion came over Evans' face.

"My name is John Ethan Shepard. I'm a member of a covert Alliance special operations unit known as Epsilon." Shepard rolled up his shirtsleeve to reveal the emblem tattooed on his upper arm, a stylized 'E' turned on its side to form a trident, enclosed in a ring of stars with 'Epsilon' and a Latin motto emblazoned below it. "Facta non Verba - deeds not words. My mission here was to cripple the Batarian Hegemony's ability to coordinate its pirate strikes and raider attacks and send them a message that the Alliance would go to any lengths to protect human interests."

"But... why us? We're Alliance – we're on the same side!"

Shepard lowered his gaze, unable to meet Evans' eyes.

"The price Aria demanded for helping me infiltrate this meeting was that I recover the OSD you're hiding. My superiors deemed you and your colleagues an acceptable sacrifice to ensure the success of my primary mission."

Acceptable sacrifice. The word sounded so clinical, completely at odds with the gruesome scene in front of him._ How many 'acceptable sacrifices' can we make before they're unacceptable? _

"Why are you telling me all this?" Evans asked, eyes starting to glaze over from blood loss. The wound on his thigh where he had been shot was bleeding heavily.

"So you know there was a reason for all of this... carnage. And that there's a reason for this..."

Shepard pressed his pistol against Evans' chest and pulled the trigger twice, the high speed slugs killing him before his body hit the floor.

"It's just the way it has to be," Shepard said softly, unsure whether he was assuring the dead man at his feet or himself. Getting down on his knees, Shepard dug into Evans' pockets, in case he had been lying about hiding the OSD. His hand closed around a velvet box. Shepard pulled it out of Evans' pocket and opened it. _An engagement ring. He was going to propose to his girlfriend when he got back. _

Closing the box carefully and putting it in his pocket, Shepard gently closed Evans' eyelids and hurriedly searched the other Alliance bodies. Unable to find the OSD, he tore off his Alliance disguise and left the silo.

_Mission accomplished. _


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

"_Good morning, Commander. " _

Shepard groaned as his eyes slowly fluttered open. His mouth felt like it was full of cotton.

"What time is it, EDI?" Shepard asked groggily as he fumbled beside his bedside for something to wet his tongue. His hand closed around something smooth and cool and he instinctively poured the nearly-empty bottle's contents into a glass and tilted it into his mouth. He winced at the burning sensation of the scotch trickling down his throat. _Why don't I keep anything non-alcoholic around here? _

"_It is currently 0800 hours, Omega time."_

_I thought we'd have a few more hours until we arrived. _Either the mass relay system had gotten faster or he was still adjusting to his reconstructed body. _I'm guessing it's the latter_. His muscles screamed in protest as he pulled himself out of bed and padded towards the shower. The aching muscles were nothing new. Synthetically enhanced muscles allowed him to run down a gazelle and even wrestle a gorilla with a decent chance of not being torn in half but they had drawbacks. The most annoying at the moment was that they took longer to warm up than the OEM version.

"It won't affect muscular performance, but it will result in some slight discomfort at times," the skinny tech at Arcturus station had assured him before his surgery. _Slight discomfort... little bastard's lucky he's half a galaxy away right now. _

Shepard stripped off his boxers and stepped into the shower. As the first droplets of water touched his skin, his brain finally processed EDI's answer to his question. He frowned.

"Wait... did you say 0800, EDI? I thought I told you to wake me if I slept in past 0500."

"_Operative Lawson thought it would be best if you were allowed to catch up on a few extra hours of sleep,"_ EDI's disconcertingly calm voice answered. _Sonova... _Shepard couldn't remember the last time he'd slept in past 5am. It should have been a minor annoyance but the daily routine of waking up early, warming up his extensively-modified musculature with a brisk workout, then powering through a mound of paperwork before breakfast was so ingrained in him that having it disrupted was intensely irritating.

Quickly finishing his shower, he grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist. To his pleasant surprise, it smelled fresh. _Fresh linens... what's next? Mints under the pillows?_ Rummaging around the cabinet beside the sink, he found a razor but no shaving cream. _Guess they didn't think of everything. _

"EDI, what's on my schedule for today?"

"_Operative Lawson requested a meeting in her office as soon as you awoke. Engineer Donnelly has something he wishes to discuss before our arrival at Omega. Cerberus Command would like..." _

"That'll be all, EDI."

Shepard finished towelling off and tossed the towel in a hatch he hoped was the laundry chute.

As he stepped out of the washroom, he belatedly remembered he hadn't removed the surveillance device from the captain's quarters. He smirked, imagining how uncomfortable Miranda would be watching him strutting around the room in the nude. Grabbing some clothes off the floor, he dressed and headed for the lift.

"EDI, inform Ms. Lawson I'll be right down."

* * *

Miranda glanced at the clock mounted on the wall above her desk and sighed. It was a shame she'd had to break their undeclared truce, but if their mission was to succeed, she had to be able to control him and influence him, preferably without his fully being aware of it. To do that she needed to find out what buttons she could push. Tampering with Shepard's sleep patterns had been a part of those efforts. _Maybe it worked a little too well_. Miranda had expected her provocation to provoke a response, but she hadn't expected him to react like a petulant child.

She called up the _Normandy_'s internal surveillance system on her monitor. Shepard was in the cargo hold beating on a training mech in what she hoped was the last part of his workout. Thickly corded arms propelled his fists repeatedly into the hapless machine, its servos whining as it struggled to recover from blows that would have hospitalized an organic being.

Despite her annoyance, she couldn't help but be impressed. The readings from the biometric monitors showed the former Spectre was hitting with at least three times the force of a normal human with each punch. She had expected Shepard to be stronger than the average man because of his physical augmentations but not to such a degree. _Seems the Alliance is willing to break its own restrictions on bioengineering when it's convenient. What a surprise._ Miranda's extensive research into Shepard's previous history as a black ops operative had quickly revealed that the Alliance was often guilty of the exact same excesses it so often accused Cerberus of. _Hypocrites. _

Her door beeped.

"Come," she called out, turning her attention from Shepard.

"The _Normandy_'s just come out of low emissions mode and our registration says we're a turian freighter operating out of the Fathar system. Joker says he should be able to maintain a flight profile to match our cover - at least until we can lose ourselves in the traffic going in and out of Omega," Jacob said, handing her a dataslate. Miranda glanced at it and set it aside to read in more detail later. She doubted anybody outside of Cerberus was even aware of either Shepard's resurrection or the new _Normandy_'s existence but she still wanted to keep a low profile. _Can't be too careful_.

"Where's Shepard? I thought he was supposed to meet you for a briefing."

Miranda tilted her head towards her monitor. Jacob leaned over her desk for a better angle and whistled in admiration.

"We heard some of the guys in the other programs were getting juiced with illegal tech but I always thought they were just stories. Why didn't we ever notice this while we were rebuilding him? Wouldn't those augmentations have been destroyed when the Collectors took him out?"

Miranda shrugged._ Actually, we did notice it but details on the reconstruction were disseminated on a need-to-know basis only. Sorry Jacob. _

"We re-implanted synthetic reinforcing fibres into major muscle groups because they were there before the Collector attack. The increased muscle density is likely the result of genetic engineering rather than simple enhancement of existing tissue as we initially believed," she lied.

Jacob frowned for a moment, trying to understand Miranda's hypothesis.

"You're saying the Alliance rewired his genes to turn him into the Incredible Hulk?"

Miranda smiled at Jacob's allusion. She'd accidentally discovered his fondness for comic books when a shipment of them had been mistakenly delivered to her when Jacob first started officially working for Cerberus. It still struck her as an odd pastime for the handsome, athletic ex-Alliance marine. Jacob looked more like a professional athlete than a comic book geek.

"Minus the green pigmentation and comically bloated physical appearance, yes."

Jacob chuckled and turned to leave.

"Then let's hope we haven't done anything to piss him off."

* * *

Shepard glanced at his chrono and smiled smugly as he walked out of the lift. _1000 hours. _Two hours after he'd informed EDI he was going to see Miranda. Feeling much more relaxed after his workout, he walked over to the ship's mess and grabbed a tray.

"What's on the menu today, Rupert?"

Mess Sergeant Gardner snorted.

"Same as yesterday. Chef's surprise. Until I get some better ingredients, that's what's going to be on the menu tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after _that_," Gardner responded, subtly reminding Shepard of his earlier request to visit the Citadel for better provisions.

Shepard's stomach growled. _I'm so sick of chef's surprise._ "Just give me a half dozen reconstituted protein bars then."

Gardner looked at Shepard as if the latter had just sprouted horns. Each ration bar contained a thousand calories, a quarter of the recommended daily caloric intake for an Alliance Marine. Most ration bars tasted more like cardboard than anything that could be called food but Shepard was famished, another of the unpleasant side effects of his augmented body.

"What flavour? Beef or... beef?"

"Surprise me."

Tearing one package open with his teeth, Shepard ravenously devoured the brownish bar contained within as he nonchalantly walked into Miranda's office, not bothering to knock or buzz first.

Miranda pointedly glanced at the clock in annoyance as he entered but he ignored her.

"Had a good workout?" she asked with mock politeness.

"I would have gotten here sooner, but for some reason I slept in. Somebody reset my alarm," Shepard answered with an innocent smile. The smile disappeared as he continued, "I don't usually sleep past five and I don't normally need an alarm to wake me up. What'd you do? Drug my food?"

The Cerberus agent didn't flinch at the accusation.

"Nothing so dramatic. I lowered the oxygen level in your quarters slightly. You haven't been getting enough rest and it's my responsibility to ensure your wellbeing, even if you don't consider it yours," she scoffed.

Shepard leaned against her door frame and crossed his arms.

"You weren't worried about inducing hypoxia?"

Miranda turned off her console and leaned forward with her elbows on her desk, her chin resting against the back of her hands.

"Commander, I have master's degrees in xenobiology and human physiology as well as a doctorate in bioengineering. This is in addition to a degree in medicine I earned from the University of Sydney at the age of seventeen. If I were to induce hypoxia in you, it wouldn't be by accident." She was speaking slowly and deliberately, deep blue eyes locked on his, her tone like that of a patient teacher dealing with a particularly slow student. "You've been having trouble sleeping since your... recovery. Perhaps you should requisition some sleeping aids from the infirmary."

Shepard's eyes narrowed. "I don't self-medicate," he shot back. He instantly regretted his response as he realized Miranda had probably seen him consume the half bottle of scotch before turning in the previous night. Fortunately, she passed on the chance to call him on it, the faint glimmer of a smirk at the corners of her mouth the only hint she had caught his gaffe. _Damnit. _

"It was only a suggestion, Commander."

Miranda handed Shepard the dataslate Jacob had given her a half hour earlier.

"We're scheduled to arrive at Omega in six hours. I took the liberty of arranging for a covert approach, seeing as you were indisposed." Shepard bristled but she continued, barely acknowledging his irritation with a smile. "But I thought you might want to review the final details."

Shepard gave the dataslate a cursory glance before tossing it back on Miranda's desk, allowing it to clatter loudly on the smooth surface. _You could have sent this to my PDA. Why am I really here? _

"You didn't call me here just to tell me you'd already done my job for me while I was knocked out," Shepard stated bluntly. Miranda's cheeks flushed as she unconsciously brushed a strand of silky brown hair out of her face and furrowed her brow. She bit her lower lip for a moment, seeming to be searching for the right words.

"We lost track of our targets. Our intel wasn't as... reliable as I'd previously believed," Miranda finally admitted.

"Both of them?" Shepard asked unnecessarily, enjoying Miranda's discomfort. "Archangel I can understand, but the salarian was supposed to be running some sort of clinic in the slums. How hard could it be to track him down?"

Miranda glared at him but chose to pretend his questions were innocuous.

"Shortly after we were given a lead on Professor Solus' whereabouts by an informant, the slum we were directed to was obliterated with some sort of tactical nuclear weapon by the Blue Suns mercenary group."

"So... Professor Solus is dead?" Shepard said slowly, processing the implications of what Miranda had just told him.

"We'd better hope not because..."

Shepard finished her sentence for her. "Professor Solus was the only freelance scientist in the Terminus systems with the expertise to develop a countermeasure to the Seeker swarms."

"I'm glad to see you read at least _some_ of the briefings I send you." Miranda smiled wanly. "Omega has been particularly chaotic and anarchic as of late, even more so than usual. Many of Cerberus' usual sources of information have gone quiet. Most of our informants are either in hiding or on the run."

"Or more likely dead," Shepard added pointedly. Miranda nodded sombrely.

"According to your file, you ran a number of deep cover surveillance operations on Omega during your time with the Alliance. I was hoping you might still have contacts we could use. I admit it's a long shot given that that was five years ago, but..."

_Christ... is there any part of my career Cerberus doesn't know about? _Shepard thought back for a moment and smiled.

"I know someone who I think could help. She owes me a favour anyways and I think it's time I collected."

* * *

"Aria T'Loak? What part of 'covert approach' did you _not_ understand, Commander?"

Getting into the Afterlife nightclub, Aria's unofficial seat of power on Omega, hadn't been easy but given a choice between a two thousand credit 'tip' or having unspeakable acts of violence inflicted on his person, a turian bouncer wisely chose the former and allowed them in through a back door.

"What?" Shepard shouted back, cupping his hand behind his ear, trying to hear what she was saying over the loud, thumping music.

"I said you're an insufferably stubborn idiot who wouldn't understand the meaning of subtlety if it hit you in the face!" Miranda smiled. The pounding bass of the music was like nails on a chalkboard to Miranda's refined tastes and it felt good in a juvenile way to get in a shot at Shepard when he couldn't respond.

Shepard shrugged and continued making his way through the crowd towards the elevated dais from which Aria looked down, literally and metaphorically, upon the great seething masses below.

Pushing their way towards the back of the club, Miranda was well aware of the number of eyes watching her. As an attractive woman, she knew very well the attention her appearance drew. Here on Omega, where humans were relative newcomers, the leering, groping, and catcalls were even worse than usual. Humans, particularly attractive females, were new and exciting to alien fetishists and sexual deviants and there was no shortage of those on Omega. No matter how many times she had been forced to visit Omega, she always shuddered at the stories of young women disappearing in clubs like Afterlife, kidnapped by slavers to live out the rest of their lives serving in nightmarish alien brothels – and that was if they were lucky.

This time however, the watching eyes seemed content simply to leer and the catcalls were kept to a minimum. The combat shotgun Jacob had clipped to his belt and the heavy assault rifle Shepard wore on his back likely had something to do with that.

An overfriendly nightclub patron, probably too drunk to notice her heavily armed companions, placed a clawed hand on her butt.

"Mmm... why don't you come over here and keep me company for a while, sweetcheeks?"

Miranda was about to teach the owner of the claw about the consequences of harassing a combat-trained biotic when she felt a human hand on her hip, steering her away. To her surprise, the hand belonged to Shepard. The ex-Spectre fixed a spine-chilling glare on the batarian, his cold grey eyes hard and unblinking.

"She's with me."

"For now," the batarian sneered lecherously. With his right hand still wrapped protectively around Miranda's waist, Shepard grabbed the batarian by the collar with his left and slammed his head into the alien's face with a vicious headbutt. The batarian crumbled to the floor, shrieking and grabbing at his shattered nose. Finally releasing his hold on Miranda's hip, Shepard nudged the crumpled alien with the toe of his boot and spoke a few words in batarian. He tilted his head to the right as he did so, a gesture she recognized as an insult in batarian culture.

"Don't get up if you want to walk out of here with your kneecaps intact," Miranda translated to Jacob. _He's more fluent in batarian than the Lazarus intel suggested. _The batarian whimpered and nodded weakly. Miranda struggled to suppress a smile as they finally reached the base of the stairs leading up to Aria's dais. She was used to fending off unwelcome advances but... _It's nice to have someone else do it once in a while_.

"You were never one who could resist causing a commotion, John. Still obsessed with being the centre of attention?"

Miranda was speechless for a brief moment as she first laid eyes on Aria T'Loak, the so-called "pirate queen of Omega". _She's even more beautiful in the flesh than in the vids._ _Wait... did she call him John?_Miranda wondered just how intimate Shepard's connection to the asari crimeboss really was given that they were apparently on a first name basis. _Maybe I don't want to know. _

"Pot. Kettle. Black," Shepard muttered in response.

Aria arched an eyebrow, unfamiliar with the expression. Shepard shrugged. "Human idiom, don't worry about it."

A batarian bodyguard, much better armed and heavier set than the one Shepard had so easily dispatched by the bar, produced a portable scanning device.

"Stand still," he grunted. Miranda was about to surrender her hand cannon but the batarian moved right past her and began sweeping it over Shepard. Shepard unclipped a pistol from his belt and flicked the safety switch on and off a few times before holstering it again.

"If you're scanning for weapons, you're not doing a great job."

Aria shook her head and momentarily turned to look over the crowded dance floor below.

"DNA scanner. Can't be too careful with dead Spectres. That could be anybody wearing your face."

The scanner beeped and the batarian nodded up at Aria to indicate he was done.

"Satisfied?" Shepard asked. Aria smiled. Miranda felt a slight shiver go up her spine. _She looks like a cat eyeing a canary. _

"For now." Aria gestured them towards the overstuffed varren-leather loungers beside hers. As he sat down, Miranda noticed how tense Jacob looked, eyes constantly scanning his surroundings, his every muscle coiled and his left hand resting on the butt of his folded shotgun, as if he was expecting to be jumped at any moment. _You were never much good at masking your feelings, Jacob_.

Shepard was the complete opposite. His athletic frame looked relaxed, with one leg resting across the other, arms draped across the back of his lounger, his hands far from his weapons. _If this is an ambush, we're already dead and he knows it. _Nonetheless, Miranda's survival instincts, honed by years of cloak-and-dagger work, directed her mind to unconsciously begin picking out possible escape routes.

"So, what brings you to my little queendom?"

"I'm looking for two individuals: a turian vigilante who goes by the name 'Archangel' and a salarian doctor, Mordin Solus."

A scantily-clad asari dancer came over with a tray of drinks and set them down on the table. Concealed in the flimsy fabric under her left arm, Miranda could barely see the outline of a small pistol. _Seems things haven't changed since I was last here. Everyone's armed on Omega._

"Nothing is free on Omega, especially not information. You know that, John," Aria said, picking up one of the drinks from the tray and taking a sip.

"Cerberus can have funds transferred to you directly," Jacob offered. Miranda admonished Jacob with an icy glare for revealing their affiliation. _Never offer your opponent any information they didn't have before._ Aria looked at him in surprise, as if she had forgotten he was there, then threw back her head and laughed.

"It's not a matter of credits. The Commander has... a special skill set I wish to make use of again."

The asari looked strangely at Shepard as she spoke. Miranda arched an eyebrow. _So that's how he knows Aria._

"It's not what you're thinking either, Lawson. If it was, this would be a lot easier," Shepard growled, as if he was reading Miranda's mind. He turned back to Aria. "I'm not here to play games, Aria. I'm here to call in a favour, not barter."

"And what favour would that be?"

Shepard rose to his feet and leaned over Aria until their faces almost touched.

"Remember the stolen data from that incident with the Alliance diplomats?" Aria's eyes narrowed as soon as the word left Shepard's lips. Shepard continued. "Those files you wanted gone aren't gone forever. You didn't really think I'd just destroy something that potentially valuable without making a copy for myself, did you?"

Aria's mouth curled into a cruel smile.

"What's to stop me from killing you and erasing those files permanently this time?"

As if on cue, Aria's bodyguards suddenly all drew their weapons. On reflex, Miranda drew hers and pointed it at the nearest guard, a heavily tattooed human. _Ten on three. They'll cut us down before we can even make a dent in their barriers. _

Shepard didn't even flinch at the hand cannon being pointed in his face by the big batarian who had scanned him earlier.

"Because you don't know where I've stored them or whether I've set up something to send the data to someone who can use it in the event of my death."

_High stakes Shepard, I hope you know what you're doing_.

Augmented muscles suddenly firing into action, Shepard ducked under the barrel of the batarian's hand cannon and grabbed the alien's wrist in one hand while ramming his opposite arm into the bodyguard's elbow, snapping the joint like a toothpick. The batarian howled in agony. Before the other guards could react, Shepard had the firearm pressed against the bottom of Aria's jaw, too close for her kinetic barriers to stop the round if he pulled the trigger.

"And because you know somebody with my 'special skillset' could do a lot of damage before your guards finally put me down."

Miranda cursed Shepard's impulsiveness as she began to focus her biotic abilities. _Maybe if that idiot can stall them for a few more seconds, I can fire off a singularity as a distraction to get us out of here. _

"This is why I like dealing with you, Shepard. You're direct and you always get right to the point." Aria nodded to her bodyguards and they all stepped back, holstering their weapons as they did so.

Shepard ejected the thermal clip from his borrowed hand cannon and discarded the weapon, stepping over its previous owner's body to return to his seat.

"Very well, I'll tell you what you want to know. For old time's sake," Aria said, the seductive smile returning to her face. Shepard smiled thinly back and took a glass from the tray, tipping it to the asari. "For old time's sake."


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

The first thing he noticed when he awoke was the distinctive smell of medigel. At first he thought he might still be lying on the floor of his destroyed apartment but he could hear the soft hum and beeping of medical equipment. He could feel a cool draft passing over his skin and realized he was dressed only in his underwear. The entire right side of his face felt like it was on fire and he could feel a dull, throbbing pain in every muscle in his body. He was lying on an operating table in what he presumed to be a medical facility. _Where am I? _His vision was still blurry but he was able to make out the white-tiled walls in the harsh glare of the overhead lights._ Probably the medbay of a ship, based on the size of the room. _An elongated orange hexagon emblem he didn't recognize adorned one wall.

"_Subject - turian male, approximately thirty years of age. Subject sustained concussion, second, third degree burns, and extensive facial contusions. Damage only superficial despite appearances. Recommendation – one week rest and continued application of medigel to damaged tissue."_

Garrus tried to turn his head towards the voice but found his neck was restrained in a brace. The way the speaker rapidly strung together his words told him it was probably a salarian. _Who's he talking to? _There didn't seem to be anyone else in the room.

"_Injuries unlikely to have long term impact on subject's combat effectiveness. Detailed record of subject's medical history required to make comprehensive prognosis. Cerberus reluctant to share medical data on crew. Unsatisfactory working arrangement. Must raise issue with Operative Lawson…"_

_Cerberus!_ Garrus felt his muscles involuntarily tighten and the temperature in the medbay seemed to suddenly drop ten degrees. He'd seen enough nightmarish Cerberus projects in his time on the _Normandy_ to know he didn't want to be in the infamous terrorist group's custody for very long. I_ need to get out of here. _As he tried to roll off the table though, he heard a door slide open and someone walked over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"It seems our patient has finally regained consciousness. How are you feeling?"

_I recognize that voice… _Garrus turned his head to look up at the speaker and tried to brush the hand off but stopped in surprise.

"Chakwas…?" he heard himself croak. The _Normandy's _chief medical officer was looking down at him with a smile on her face.

"Welcome back to the realm of the living, Garrus." She took him by the shoulders and gently helped him slowly sit up on the table. "Judging by the expression on your face, I'm guessing you weren't expecting to see me. Believe me, I was just as surprised to see you wheeled into my infirmary."

She gestured over to a salarian standing on the other side of the medbay. He was dressed in a white labcoat and as he turned, Garrus could see that the tip of one of his cranial horns was missing and his weathered face was criss-crossed by faint scars.

"This is Professor Mordin Solus. He's been taking care of you for the past few hours. His methods and treatments are… unconventional but they seem to have worked with you."

_Mordin Solus. The crazy salarian doctor with the clinic in the slums. _Garrus had heard the stories about the salarian, about him singlehandedly taking on entire bands of Blue Suns and executing them. He'd heard the rumours that Dr. Solus had once served in the legendary salarian Special Tasks Group and from the scars he could believe it. He and his men had always steered a wide berth around the salarian despite the fact they seemed to share a common foe in the vicious gangs that prowled Omega's slums. From the rumours, Mordin Solus had seemed unpredictable, dangerous, and more than a little insane. The huge smile plastered across Solus' face now as the salarian looked at him didn't do anything to change Garrus' last assessment.

"Quite familiar with Archangel by reputation despite never crossing paths. Exceptional tactical planning and execution, although rationale behind indiscriminate strategy to attack Omega's ruling gangs remains elusive personally. But pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Mr. Vakarian."

Garrus cocked an eye ridge and glanced at Chakwas but she just gave him a helpless shrug.

"Um… yeah, you too, Dr. Solus."

The salarian flashed another smile.

"Work here appears to be done. Will be returning to lab, if skills no longer required."

"Go ahead, Dr. Solus. I think I can take over from here."

The salarian nodded and left the medbay. As soon as the door slid shut, Garrus turned back to Chakwas.

"Doctor, where am I?"

"You're in the _Normandy_ SR-2's medbay."

"The _Norma_…? What's going on?" Garrus jumped off the table and felt his legs almost give out from the anaesthetics still running through his system. Chakwas grabbed his arm to keep him from falling. When he'd steadied himself, she sighed and leaned back against one of the beds.

"I think it'd be best if I let Shepard fill you in on all the details."

* * *

"What about the Blue Suns? Do you think they'll be a problem in the future?"

"Yes, but not because of anything we did on Omega. They take on at least forty percent of the mercenary contracts in the Terminus Systems and they'll work for anybody. Cerberus has worked with them in the past but we've also had more than our share of run-ins with them as well." Miranda scoffed. "If you're asking if they'll take our interference in their operations personally, the answer is probably no. Their motives are purely business-related and holding grudges is bad for business. That goes for the Eclipse as well." She frowned and turned her gaze back to one of the datapads scattered on the briefing room conference table. "The Blood Pack could be a problem though. This Garm you killed is related to a number of individuals suspected to be senior members of the organization and krogan _are_ known for holding grudges."

"You two killed everything down there. Come on, Miranda, do you really think news about what happened to Garm is going to get out?" Jacob interjected. The ex-Alliance marine had remained mostly quiet for most of the debriefing, seemingly content to allow Shepard and Miranda to continue to play their peculiar verbal cat-and-mouse game. He was either oblivious or feigning ignorance. _Probably the latter, Taylor's not an idiot_.

Miranda's questions and comments in the mission debriefing seemed innocuous enough but Shepard suspected she was testing him, trying to see if he'd missed anything or if she could cause him to slip up. The way she fixed him with her cool blue eyes reminded him uncomfortably of the eagle-like stares of his instructors on Arcturus when they deliberately threw an impossible scenario at him and asked him to solve it. Every once in a while, she'd quirk her eyebrow at something he said. _Does that mean she approves or disapproves? _He still hadn't figured that out. _Maybe the best strategy is just to ignore her games. _

"The news _always_ gets out, especially in places like Omega," he sighed. "I should probably go check on Garrus."

He'd intended to do so earlier, but Miranda had insisted on an immediate debriefing. She'd justified it by arguing it was best to get all the details ironed out while they were still fresh in their minds and he'd agreed, not realizing that Miranda would drag it out over several hours.

"That won't be necessary, Commander. EDI has been sending me frequent updates on his status since we brought him back to the _Normandy_."

Shepard glanced at her suspiciously. She hadn't left the room or checked her omnitool since the debriefing had begun. Before he could ask her how EDI had been updating her, she brushed her hair back and touched her right ear.

"Aural implant," she explained. "EDI sends me updates on everything of significance that occurs on the _Normandy_."

"And…?"

Miranda jotted down a few notes with her stylus and set the datapad down.

"He was caught in the blast of an antipersonnel missile at close range. He would have been killed instantly were it not for his armour. Dr. Solus and Dr. Chakwas have been working on him since we returned, but the damage was extensive…"

The door to the briefing room suddenly slid open, cutting Miranda off. A familiar figure clad in blue armour walked through the door. _Well, mostly familiar. _The right side of Garrus neck and jaw were sheathed in a protective covering and his face was streaked with the familiar pattern of shrapnel scars.

"How bad is it, Shepard? Nobody would give me a mirror."

Jacob whistled in admiration. "Tough son of a bitch. Didn't think he'd be up yet."

"Hell, Garrus, you were always ugly." Shepard grinned wryly. "Slap some face paint on there and no one will even notice."

The turian laughed, his mandibles twitching as he did so. Shepard had forgotten how strange it sounded to hear a turian laugh. Besides Garrus, he could count the number of times he'd heard turian laughter on one hand.

"Don't make me laugh, my face is barely holding together as it is." Garrus grimaced and touched his covered right mandible.

Jacob cleared his throat loudly.

"Garrus, Jacob and Miranda. Miranda and Jacob, Garrus," Shepard nodded to each of them in turn. Long introductions were a waste of time. Things like titles and last names were unnecessary details that were usually forgotten as soon as the introductions were over.

"I've gone over your file a few times, Mr. Vakarian. Your C-Sec records made for some interesting reading, particularly in your later years," Miranda said. _I guess the details aren't unnecessary for some of us. _

"It's just Garrus, and uh… thanks. Your rescue was very… impressive too."

Miranda smiled politely. "That was mostly the Commander's doing. Shepard's stealth insertion was a little unorthodox but it proved to be effective."

"Well, I'm usually an insufferably stubborn idiot who can't understand the meaning of subtlety, even when it hits me in the face, but this time I thought I'd try something new," Shepard said with mock modesty, enjoying the sight of Miranda's cheeks reddening at his repetition of her words in Afterlife.

Miranda shot him an icy look before turning back to Garrus.

"Jacob and I should be getting back to our duties. If you need anything I'll be in my office on the crew deck, Garrus." Tilting her head at Jacob, the two of them left the briefing room, leaving Shepard and Garrus by themselves.

"Settling in alright?" Shepard asked as the briefing room slid shut. Garrus looked around suspiciously, as if unsure whether they were still being watched.

"Frankly, I'm more worried about you, Shepard. Working with Cerberus now? You remember those sick experiments they were doing?"

"Do you remember what I told you about my mission when we were chasing Saren?" Shepard fixed his eyes on Garrus. "The Reapers are the greatest threat galactic civilization has ever known. I will do _anything _it takes to stop them. If that means working with the likes of Cerberus, I'll do it."

Garrus looked away, uncomfortable facing Shepard's hard stare. It was a reaction Shepard was used to. _God knows I've used it to my advantage enough times in the past. _

"Can't argue with that. Hard to believe no one else is doing anything to help. Damn politicians." The turian straightened up. "I'm ready for duty, Shepard. If you need me I'll be down in the forward batteries."

"I'll walk you down."

Walking to the main elevator, Shepard waited for Garrus to enter.

"Engineering deck, EDI."

"On the old _Normandy_ the main batteries were on the crew deck," Garrus commented. Shepard nodded.

"They still are."

When the elevator stopped, Shepard made his way into engineering.

"Engineers Donnelly and Daniels," Shepard gestured to the two engineers without stopping. Garrus barely had time to acknowledge them before Shepard disappeared into the engine core. As soon as Garrus crossed the threshold, Shepard closed the containment door. Garrus arched the plate above his left eye inquisitively.

"This is the only part of the ship not being monitored. The Tantalus core messes with electronics, including bugs and surveillance devices."

The turian pressed a claw against his visor for a moment to check and then nodded. "I should have thought of that."

Shepard shrugged.

"This working arrangement with Cerberus is a marriage of convenience." Shepard sighed. "I'm not an idiot, Garrus. I've seen too many of Cerberus' fuck-ups and crazy projects to consider any kind of permanent association with them."

Garrus frowned. "Shepard, you didn't say why we have to work with them."

_We. He said we. _Shepard was surprised Garrus had taken the news about him working with Cerberus so calmly. After all they'd seen of Cerberus, he'd half expected the turian to demand to be dropped off at their next port of call.

"Cerberus has something I need, something we haven't had since you put that slug in Saren's head back on the Citadel."

Garrus looked confused for a moment but then his eyes widened slightly as the realization of what Shepard was talking about dawned on him.

"A lead. You actually think Cerberus' theory about the link between the Collector abductions and the Reapers is real?"

"How'd you know about the Collectors?"

The turian did an approximation of a shrug.

"Chakwas filled me in a little while I was in the medbay."

Shepard was glad Chakwas had already explained the Collector angle to Garrus. The situation they found themselves in, working for Cerberus, chasing down an enigmatic race of aliens most of the galaxy considered to be nothing but myth, was difficult enough to believe that it was probably easier to take in a little bit at a time.

"It sounds insane, doesn't it? But in all those months we spent searching for clues after the Battle of the Citadel we weren't able to find anything. The intel Cerberus has collected fits with what little we uncovered. Also, the Collector technology has enough similarities to some of what we dug out of Sovereign's wreckage that I'm willing to give the theory about a connection a chance." Shepard leaned against the safety railing that surrounded the glowing engine core. "Besides, I figured if they were willing to spend billions of credits recovering my body and figuring out how to bring me back from the dead to follow this lead, they've got to be pretty sure they're on to something."

"Resurrecting the dead? That sounds like bad science fiction, Shepard."

The engine core flickered, causing both of them to instinctively recoil. Despite its size, the _Normandy _SR-2's overpowered engines occasionally taxed even the Tantalus core's output.

"Yeah, I would have thought the same but somehow I'm standing here. If you want the full story, go to Miranda. I'm sure she'll be able to bore you to sleep with the science behind it."

"Have you contacted the Alliance or the Council yet?" Garrus asked, glancing at the containment door as if expecting to find a spy had snuck in. Shepard shook his head.

"They pushed me – us – to the sidelines after Sovereign was destroyed. I barely had any credibility even before I… died." The idea that he'd been physically killed still seemed absurd and he had trouble fully coming to terms with it. "I doubt I'll have any credibility at all if I show up and claim I was resurrected at a top secret Cerberus research facility. I'll contact the Council eventually, but I want something concrete to bring to them when I do. I might only get one shot to convince them I'm right about the Reapers." Shepard laughed bitterly. "I never thought I'd have to convince anybody about the Reapers again, not after one of them showed up on the doorstep of the Citadel and took out half the defence fleet."

"The Council won't be happy knowing you worked with Cerberus and left them out of the loop for so long, Shepard. Cerberus is considered to be a terrorist organization by both the Council and the Alliance."

Shepard shrugged. "Being labelled a traitor is just a risk I'm going to have to take," he said with far more confidence than he felt.

"Then we'd better find them something good," Garrus said grimly. "Hopefully it won't take a Reaper trying to land on the Citadel again this time."

* * *

Miranda frowned as she tried to finish her report to the Illusive Man. Like herself, the Illusive Man was obsessed with details and she couldn't leave anything out, no matter how insignificant it might seem at the time. She was finding it difficult to concentrate at the moment though. _The two cups of coffee probably didn't help. _She might literally be superhuman, but that didn't make her immune to the effects of overdosing on caffeine. She scolded herself for not thinking of that earlier.

"What's eating you?"

She looked up in surprise to see Jacob standing in her doorway. _How did I not hear the door open? Did I even close it? _Seeing tooth marks in the end of her stylus made her realize she'd been chewing on it again. She discretely slipped it into the wastebin under her desk and turned her attention to Jacob.

"It's nothing. I'm just working on a report to the Illusive Man," she said quickly. "How are things working out with Mordin? I imagine it can't be easy working right next door from him."

Jacob chuckled. He'd always been quick to laugh, easily able to see the humour in any situation. It annoyed her at times but it was also something she occasionally envied.

"No, he's great. There was that time he stumbled on my stack of comics and spent ten minutes explaining to me why Peter Parker's encounter with a radioactive spider couldn't have resulted in anything more than a nasty skin rash, but then that was mostly my fault since I asked."

Miranda rolled her eyes. Jacob grinned. "I just thought I drop by to give you this week's equipment requisition orders."

"Jacob, what do you think of Garrus Vakarian?" Miranda asked as she took the proffered dataslate.

Jacob shrugged. "He seems alright. Mostly keeps to himself. He came by the armoury once to request some specialized equipment. Tried making a joke about him being Omega's version of Batman but it went completely over his head, even after I showed him an example."

"I was referring to the impact of having him on the _Normandy_, given his past with Shepard. What effect do you think it will have on the mission?"

Jacob's expression became serious. "What are you thinking?"

"I was looking at the list of potential recruits the Illusive Man forwarded to Shepard. I cross-referenced them with Shepard's service record – the parts we were able to find that is – and Shepard had never crossed paths with most of them. That's not a coincidence, Jacob. Shepard has very rarely ever worked with the same team for more than one assignment."

"Maybe this time having someone he's gone to war with before on the team will make things easier for him. Mission like this, it's good to have someone you trust watching your back."

"I was hoping that one of us would become that person," Miranda said. She rested her elbow on the armrest of her chair. "This could pose a problem if Garrus' presence prevents us from establishing any kind of rapport with Shepard."

"You were hoping that if Shepard was alone with a bunch of strangers, he'd form a closer relationship with us because we would have been the ones he'd known the longest," Jacob said slowly, picking up on her line of thought. Miranda nodded.

"Garrus being here doesn't prevent us from forming that kind of relationship with Shepard. What _will _stop you from gaining his trust is if you keep treating him like a mark." Jacob sighed and plopped down in one of the chairs in her office. "These head games you've been trying to play with him aren't going to work, Miranda."

Miranda arched an eyebrow. "You noticed?"

Jacob snorted. "You've messed with his sleeping schedule and his diet, you've been stealing his smokes, every time you're in a briefing together you treat him like one of your Cerberus trainees…"

She hadn't expected Jacob would catch on to that last part. _Was I that obvious? _It shouldn't been that surprising, now that she thought about it. Jacob had been one of those trainees for two months.

"What do you think I should do?"

"Shepard's been in this cloak-and-dagger game at least as long as you have. The smoke and mirrors stuff aren't going to fool him. If you're going to gain his trust you're going to have to stop the games and start treating him like a normal person. If you want him to trust you you're going to have to form a relationship with him the old fashioned way. No shortcuts." Jacob got up to leave, but turned and flashed her a grin. "That trick with the champagne and the unbuttoned top isn't going to work this time."

She couldn't help but smile at Jacob's comment. _In hindsight, the champagne was a little over the top._

"Thanks, Jacob."

"Yeah, anytime." As soon as Jacob left, Miranda's smile left her face. Jacob made the idea of "forming a relationship the old fashioned way" sound so simple. _That's probably because for him, it really is that simple_. She'd always had to rely on other methods to get people to like and trust her. A firm grasp of psychology and decent acting could usually do the job – _well enough to complete the mission, anyway_ – but if that didn't work, she was lost more often than she liked to admit. With men (and some women) she could sometimes fall back on her looks but she wasn't sure such a strategy would work this time. Jacob's last comment had been made in jest, but he was probably right – seduction would at best be fruitless and could even backfire on her.

It had been weeks since they'd first met and Shepard still hadn't shown any interest in her in that way. _Maybe he's gay. _Remembering the personal details of his dossier immediately shot down that musing. Shepard wasn't exactly a hypersexual like she suspected the Illusive Man was, but he never seemed to be lacking in female companionship for very long either. She shook her head at her hubris. _Just because he's not into _you_ doesn't mean he's not into women. Maybe you're just not his type. _The idea still bothered her though. She'd never thought of herself as the type of woman to feel insecure about her looks but it irritated her that Shepard seemed able to ignore her physical charms so easily. She had been engineered to be every man's 'type'. Was it something she'd done or said?

Miranda sighed. She must be more tired than she'd thought if she was wasting time fretting over whether Shepard thought she was attractive. She could see the bottom of her coffee mug. _Another cup can't hurt, can it? _She arched her back in her chair and stretched. She grabbed her coffee mug and got out of her chair. She could use a walk to stretch her muscles. The decision over whether to refill her mug could wait until she reached the kitchen.

When she reached the doorway of her room, she almost turned back around. Shepard was sitting by himself in the mess, picking through a plateful of food. _Just go over there and talk to him. He's not going to bite. You can't make things any worse than they are. _

Pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee from the coffee machine, she walked over to his table.

"Good evening, Commander. Is this seat taken?"

Shepard looked up at her and shrugged.

"I don't see anyone else in the mess."

Miranda forced a laugh and took the seat across from him, hoping Shepard's comment was a joke. To her relief, he shot her a quick grin before turning his attention back to his food.

"Where did you guys find Mess Sergeant Gardner?"

"I'm… not sure. I wasn't involved in recruiting the _Normandy_ crew, other than overseeing the background checks. Why do you ask?"

Shepard stabbed a chunk of chicken on his plate with his fork and made a face.

"I'm guessing he wasn't hired for his culinary skills."

Miranda smiled. "No, I suppose he wasn't. At least that doesn't appear to be yet another iteration of his chef's surprise."

Shepard held up his fork with the mutilated chicken speared on its tines.

"I suggested Gardner try making roast chicken. It's simple, takes no preparation time, and everyone likes a good roast chicken. I thought it'd be impossible to screw up." He made a show of sticking the chicken in his mouth and trying to chew on it. "I was wrong."

A small laugh – genuine this time – escaped Miranda's mouth.

"What's wrong with it?"

Shepard sighed.

"It's overcooked, over-salted, and he mistook dill for the rosemary I told him to use. How the hell do you mix up dill and rosemary?" he asked in exasperation. "He also either forgot or was too lazy to bother trussing up the legs and wings so they've been burnt to a crisp."

An image of Shepard dressed in a chef's smock, starring in his own cooking holoshow appeared in Miranda's mind and she had to bring her coffee mug up to her face to hide the amused expression she was wearing.

"I didn't realize you knew so much about roasting a chicken."

Shepard didn't seem to notice her amusement as he swallowed another chunk of dried out chicken and looked up at her.

"When you go as long as I have without a wife or girlfriend to cook for you, you pick up a few things along the way." Shepard speared a depressingly limp piece of broccoli and grimaced as he put it in his mouth. "So what's keeping you up so late?"

"Finishing up a report to the Illusive Man," Miranda replied. "How's Garrus?"

Shepard finally seemed to give up on his meal and pushed the plate away.

"Hasn't missed a beat. It's like Jacob said – he's even tougher than he looks."

"That's… good," Miranda said lamely, suddenly unable to find a better adjective. Trying to allow a conversation to continue spontaneously was difficult when she was simultaneously trying so hard to avoid steering it along a predetermined path.

"Maybe. It wouldn't hurt him to slow down for a moment – same with Mordin." Shepard absentmindedly played with the knife still in his hand, spinning it around his fingers a few times in a rapid pattern. Miranda was amazed he hadn't drawn blood – either from himself or her. "They were both lucky we got there when we did. I guess timing really is everything."

Miranda nodded.

"Luck does seem to play an inordinately large role on Omega."

"Not your first time on the station then? Did it look any better than the last time you visited?"

"Omega was, is, and likely always will be a pisshole. I've been there on missions a few times and every time I leave I feel like I have to take a shower – in additional to the usual decontamination."

"That's one way of describing it," Shepard chuckled. "Operations on Omega are always a crapshoot. There're always a million and one things that can – and usually do – go wrong."

Miranda took a sip of her coffee. _Damnit. Forgot to put in sugar. _She was reluctant to get up when the flow of the conversation seemed to be going so well though.

"Perhaps, but I thought the extraction missions on Omega went quite well, considering how little intelligence we had to work off of. You seem to have a knack for those types of missions."

Shepard shrugged.

"You didn't do so badly yourself. I doubt any of the mercs down there were expecting to face a biotic with your kind of abilities. I haven't worked with many biotics with your level of control before. The precision it takes to use a warp blast to shred the turbine blades of a gunship engine isn't something I've seen very often."

Miranda was surprised he'd noticed. Few non-biotics, even soldiers who regularly worked with biotics, were able to appreciate the level of control combat biotics needed to use their powers effectively. Shepard continued. "I find the key to working on Omega is just to keep things simple. Stay alert, keep under the radar as much as possible, and don't draw any attention to yourself until you're ready to strike."

"Is that why you spared that batarian in the slums?"

Shepard frowned.

"He wasn't a threat to the mission. There wasn't any reason to kill him."

"You didn't just 'not kill' him, you actually gave him an application of medigel," Miranda pointed out.

"I needed information and I saw no reason not to. It's not like I was short of the stuff at the time. Why are you asking about that one batarian anyway…" The perplexed expression left Shepard's face as he figured out what she was thinking. Miranda stared at him curiously. "Oh… I get it. You think because of my history with batarians I should hate all batarians everywhere."

"No! That's not what I…" Miranda protested. Shepard put up his hands to stop her.

"It's alright. Batarians killed my entire family as well as dozens of men under my command. I have good reasons to hate them and I used to." Shepard leaned back in his chair. "But I got over it."

"You're saying you… forgave them?" Miranda asked incredulously.

"No. I got my revenge." Shepard's expression darkened. "There were sixty-seven batarians in the slaver band that attacked Mindoir. I hunted down all sixty-seven of them..."

Shepard seemed to be staring through her, as if he had forgotten she was even there.

"For every man or woman I've lost to the squints, I've killed at least ten of them in return. I lost track of how many batarians I've killed a long time ago. Now, I still dislike batarians, but I only hate the ones that get in my way."

The steel knife Shepard had been holding in his hand was bent into an s-shape. Shepard set it down, seemingly unbothered by the deep cuts it had made in his hand. She was suddenly very aware of why before he'd been chosen for the Spectres, he'd been considered the most deadly assassin the Alliance N7 program had ever produced. His grey eyes were cold and hard as granite. His lips were pressed together into a thin, unforgiving line and the sharply-defined muscles in his arms were as taut as titanium cables. John Shepard was a purebred killer, mind and body forged into a deadly, unstoppable weapon_._ _What does it take to turn a man into something like this? Was it Mindoir? _

"So… all that killing worked?" she asked, furrowing her brow. The fire in his eyes died and he averted his gaze. Miranda felt her own muscles relax, unaware she had even tensed them in the first place.

"Yes," he said softly, his voice less certain than his answer. _That sounds like doubt._ He picked up his plate and got up. "I should probably turn in. Goodnight, Operative Lawson."

* * *

Councillor David Anderson rewinded the recording and played it again. He rubbed his temples. It was only one in the afternoon and already he felt exhausted. Politics seemed to have a way of mentally and physically draining his energy in a way that a thirty-five year career in the military never had. Not for the first time, he wondered whether he would rather have to spend another day in meetings with the Council or be forced to defend a fortified bunker with nothing but a butter knife. _At least in the bunker I was armed. _And then there was Udina… The former ambassador had a unique gift for making an already difficult job for Anderson even more miserable. _Sometimes I think he actually enjoys it. _

"Are you sure this recording wasn't doctored?"

The salarian on the other end of the intranet connection shook her head. Lina had always been reliable in the past but with something like this one couldn't be too careful.

"I spliced it together by combining recordings from mercenary helmet and gunnery cams and Aria's local surveillance net."

"Were you seen?"

"Maybe by a few of Aria's people, but I doubt they recognized me."

Anderson nodded. Hunting quarry like the man he was looking for was difficult and dangerous. One slip-up and he was likely to turn on his pursuers, eliminate them, and disappear back into the galaxy's dark underbelly.

"How old is this?"

"Less than two standard Citadel days. I followed your instructions exactly and sent it to you as soon as I received and reviewed it."

The salarian was fidgeting. It was subtle, but Anderson could see Lina was nervous. He didn't blame her. The only people willing to spend extended periods of time on Omega were those so desperate that they had no other alternative and the gangs that ruled over them with an iron fist.

"Thank you, Lina. I've already forwarded your usual fee, plus a sizeable bonus."

"Pleasure doing business with you, Councillor."

Lina terminated the link. The fact he knew nothing about Lina other than her name, which was almost definitely fake, while she probably knew everything about him made him uncomfortable but there was nothing he could do about it. The galaxy's best information brokers were notoriously secretive and the extreme imbalance of power between them and their clients was just another one of the considerable costs of doing business with them. In a galaxy where information was the most pure currency of power, good information brokers could name their price.

Anderson pushed his chair back from his desk and walked over to the balcony in his office overlooking the Presidium.

"VI, transfer the last recording to my omnitool and delete it and any recordings of my last intranet exchange from your memory banks."

"_Deleting data."_

The VI beeped, indicating it had obliterated all traces of his exchange with Lina and the recording she had sent him. Shepard was back. Now Anderson just had to figure out how he'd managed it and why he'd come out of hiding.

Anderson waved his hand over his omnitool.

"Tammy, cancel my afternoon appointment with the elcor ambassador and extend to him my apologies. I'm leaving for the day."

"Are you feeling alright, Councillor? Would you like me to call your doctor?" his assistant's voice asked in her usual calm, pleasant tone.

Anderson threw his coat over his shoulders.

"Thanks, Tammy, but that won't be necessary. I'm just feeling a little tired. I might be back later tonight."

"I'll hold your calls then. Goodnight, Councillor."

"Goodnight, Tammy."

Anderson walked a few blocks from the Alliance embassy and ducked into a public intranet access terminal. Looking up a name on his omnitool, he punched in the contact information, occasionally looking around to make sure he wasn't being watched and trying to appear as casual as he could. He should really be taking some time to think about what he should do about Shepard's reappearance but he wasn't sure time was a luxury he had.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

Miranda stood at attention, both hands clasped behind her back as the walls around her disappeared, replaced by a holographic image of the Illusive Man's command centre.

"Hello Miranda." The Illusive Man was seated with his back to her; the omnipresent cigarette perched in one hand, a glass in the other. "You're not scheduled to check in for another two days."

She stepped forward.

"There are important matters pertaining to the mission that we need to discuss," Miranda stated bluntly. The Illusive Man hated any deviation from standard communications protocol, but considering the importance of what she had to say, she knew he'd let the intrusion slide. The Illusive Man didn't turn his chair around.

"Can it wait? I already received your most recent mission report. Everything appears to be proceeding according to schedule."

"No, it pertains to Shepard. I have reason to doubt his mental stability."

The Illusive Man took in a long drag of his cigarette, holding it in for a brief moment and slowly blowing the smoke out, before rotating his chair.

"We've been over this, Miranda. Before the Lazarus Project proceeded, Dr. Crowe and his team assured me there was nothing in Commander Shepard's medical record to suggest he was likely to be susceptible to developing mental health problems for the duration of the mission."

"I've uncovered new data which requires that we review that assessment."

The Illusive Man quirked his eyebrow slightly but his face was otherwise emotionless. Miranda frowned. She'd done some digging after her conversation with Shepard about the batarians, working off only a hunch but as usual, her instincts hadn't failed her. _For once I wish I was wrong_.

"In a conversation I had with Shepard last night, he claimed to have hunted down the batarian pirates responsible for the raid on Mindoir, the attack that killed his family. I did some further research that confirmed his claim, but Shepard didn't mention that he'd also been hunting down everyone remotely connected to them. He wasn't entirely honest about the number of Mindoir raiders he'd terminated either." She glanced at the Illusive Man but he just stared back at her. Over the years she'd been able to pick up a few tells that allowed her to guess what he was thinking but there were times he was still completely inscrutable. "They're at least twenty surviving Mindoir raiders and based on what he's done so far, I believe it's reasonable to assume he'll continue his obsessive quest for revenge, possibly even at the cost of our mission."

"Miranda, what's your assessment of Shepard, given the additional information you now have?"

Miranda narrowed her eyes._ My assessment? We have an obsessed madman on our hands!_

"Shepard is like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick – if Captain Ahab was a sadistic madman who in addition to pursuing his nemesis, was also hunting down, torturing to death, and mutilating the bodies of every whale that shared an ocean with it."

"Torture, gratuitous violence, and collateral damage… you've always been uncomfortable with them," the Illusive Man stated calmly.

"They draw unwanted attention. They're unprofessional and usually unnecessary." Miranda crossed her arms across her chest. "I've never made my distaste a secret."

"No, you haven't." The Illusive Man flicked his cigarette with a snap of his wrist. "It's certainly not a secret to Shepard anymore."

"Excuse me?" Miranda asked in a more forceful tone than she'd intended. _What the hell is he talking about?_

"How did you access the intelligence that allowed you to corroborate Shepard's claims? The Cerberus internal data network?" Miranda eyed the Illusive Man warily. _Where's he going with this now?_ "Did you cross-reference any of it with extranet intelligence feeds?"

"No, it was highly specific, classified information. I didn't want to leave a trail," Miranda said, an inexplicable feeling of unease growing in her. The Illusive Man finally decided to put her out of her misery.

"According to Alliance records, the band of pirates that attacked Mindoir was estimated to be about one hundred-strong by the first Alliance reinforcements that arrived on the scene. This exact strength of the raiders was later determined by Alliance Naval Intelligence to be eighty-nine. Of those eighty-nine, eighty-one have been confirmed dead, most of them the victims of targeted strikes conducted with extreme precision. Three of them were killed in their homes without cohabitants even realizing what had happened." The Illusive Man pressed a button on his side console and a statuesque blonde entered the room with an ornate crystal decanter and refilled his glass.

Miranda felt her face twist into a look of disgust as it dawned on her what the Illusive Man was saying.

"He was playing me."

"You shouldn't be surprised. He attempted something similar immediately after Freedom's Progress." The Illusive Man took a sip from his glass and set it down in his armrest. "I don't have to tell you how crucial the success of this mission is, not just for Cerberus but for the entire human race. We need Shepard firmly on our side. Do whatever it takes to secure his trust."

"That could be difficult. Shepard seems to know me better than I know him," Miranda said bitterly.

Pulling his cigarette case from his jacket, the Illusive Man slipped a cigarette between his lips and snapped the case shut.

"Then maybe it's time you reinvented yourself."

* * *

Shepard stripped down his sniper rifle and reassembled it. _Six and a half seconds. You're getting rusty. _He allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation. Slipping the doctored intelligence reports into Cerberus' internal network hadn't been easy. _Or maybe you're just distracted. _Even with the doctored reports, he hadn't expected Miranda to buy his story about the batarians. But just as he'd hoped, she'd checked up on his story and seemed to have bought it. Despite all her training, experience and intelligence though, it seemed she could be just as prone as anyone else to believe a story that fit her preconceived had formed an idea about who he was in her head and anything he told her that fit that idea would likely be accepted. She wanted to think he was nothing more than a killer and what he'd told her had confirmed it.

He stripped the weapon down and put it together again. _Five seconds. That's more like it. _He levelled it down the range and squeezed the trigger repeatedly until the heatsink popped out and struck the _Normandy's_ metal cargo deck with a loud _ping_.

"EDI, results."

"_All ten of your shots struck well within the standard killzone, Commander. Four struck within one millimetre of the optimal aiming point, four within five millimetres, and one struck six millimetres from centre."_

Shepard cursed.

"Was it the last one again?"

"_Affirmative, Commander. Visual analysis shows that your right hand shifts slightly forward to account for recoil towards the end of the sequence."_

As much as it bothered him, he knew there wasn't much he could do about that. _Still… six millimetres variation at a range of six hundred metres could amount to a metre at ten kilometres. _The state-of-the-art firing range Jacob had installed in the cargo bay could simulate ranges up to a kilometre with its holographic projectors. Longer distances would require that he switch to a training weapon firing simulated rounds. Jacob had assured him the training weapons could accurate replicate recoil but Shepard still preferred the feel and sound of real bullets.

_So what did Miranda's reaction mean? _In the days following their conversation, she'd looked more disturbed by what he'd allegedly done than he'd thought she would. Her reaction wasn't what he'd expected. Given how much she must have seen and done as a veteran Cerberus field operative, he would have thought she'd be inured to the idea of torture and killing. _Evidently not. _It seemed his initial impression of her was just as wrong as hers was of him.

"You need more practice."

"Not as much as you," Shepard said, loading another thermal clip into his rifle and tossing it to Garrus. The turian caught it deftly in one claw and took Shepard's place in the firing lane.

"You've been down here for four hours."

"Perfection takes work." Shepard stretched his arms and cracked his neck. "You know, you still owe me the story of how you ended up on Omega."

Garrus adjusted the sight on the rifle and fired off a few shots. The turian narrowed his eyes and adjusted the sight again.

"The barrel on this needs to be realigned. It's offset a little to the right."

"That's intentional. I pull to the left." Shepard grabbed another rifle from the rack and handed it to Garrus, taking back his own rifle and carefully slipping it back into its heavily worn carrying case. "You know I have ways of making you talk."

Garrus chuckled. "Torture? Shepard, I've got so many painkillers running through me right now that you could throw me out an airlock and I wouldn't feel it." Firing a few shots from the new weapon, he cocked his head to the side, adjusted the scope, and fired again. Shepard leaned against a bulkhead and crossed his arms.

"I'm not due to relieve Miranda in the CIC for another seven hours so I can literally stand here all day."

Garrus ignored him for a few more minutes but eventually seemed to come to the realization that Shepard was serious and finally set the rifle down.

"I trained to become a Spectre after the Normandy was destroyed, but it didn't work out. Too much politicking on the Citadel, nobody was willing to take risks. Omega was filled with criminals nobody else could touch, and there was no red tape to slow me down. It was a perfect fit. People there needed someone to believe in. Someone to stand up to the local thugs."

"So you thought you were going to scrub out every single scumbag on Omega by yourself? Just you and your rifle against the world?" Shepard asked incredulously.

Garrus shrugged, a distinctly human gesture he'd picked up over the last few months of his stint on the old _Normandy_. "I had help. There were twelve of us, including me. Former military operatives, C-Sec agents, the usual. Had a salarian explosives expert, pretty sure he'd spent time in the Special Tasks Group. My tech expert was a batarian, believe it or not. Not the friendliest guy, but he could hack any system ever built." The turian's eyes took on a newfound intensity as he spoke that Shepard wasn't accustomed to seeing in the normally reserved ex C-Sec officer. "You saw Omega – it was full of thugs kicking the helpless. I formed my team to kick back. We weren't mercenaries - nobody was paying us. We made money by taking down slaver, pirates, or gangs that went too far."

"Still, that doesn't sound like an easy life. Hard to believe you were able to find that many people just willing to drop everything to fight an unwinnable war."

The turian bristled and shook his head. "It might have seemed unwinnable but somebody needed to do something and I was making a difference. You prove that you get things done, and people join up. My team was different. We didn't shake anyone down. No civilian casualties. That was our rule. Every member of my team had lost someone to Omega's gangs. We weren't out to get rich. We were out to make those bastards think twice before murdering someone in the street."

Garrus picked up his rifle and expertly began to disassemble it to clean. His voice took on a satisfied tone.

"We got three separate merc bands to work together to take me down. My manager at C-Sec would be impressed. It was simple. We'd hit their shipments, disrupt activities, get under their skin. Make them angry. They'd come charging right into our well-prepared killzone. Crossfire and snipers, clean and surgical. They never stood a chance."

An image of rows of bodybags in Garrus' hideout, neatly – almost reverently – arranged in straight lines came to Shepard's mind and he was about to ask about them when something stopped him. For a moment neither of them spoke, Shepard unsure how he should broach the subject, Garrus seemingly unwilling to. The latter finally broke the silence, reassembling the rifle in his hands and setting it aside.

"They're all dead now," he said quietly.

"You had to know casualties would be inevitable. We've both been in this business long enough to know that the other guy shoots back," Shepard said carefully. "Omega's gangs outnumbered you. If you and your crew kept up your fight, Omega and the odds would eventually catch up to every one of you."

"A part of me knew that but I was too distracted by what we had achieved. I thought we had a few more months before the odds would get us. I was wrong." Garrus suddenly seemed strangely entranced by his gauntleted claws, staring down at them as he manipulated them. "It was my own damn fault."

"What happened?" Shepard asked.

"One of my people betrayed me. A turian named Sidonis. He drew me away just before the mercs attacked my squad, then he disappeared. Everyone except me is dead because of him and because I didn't see it coming."

"You sure it wasn't an honest mistake?"

"No. I've put out feelers with some old contacts. He booked transport off Omega just before the attack. He also cleared out his private accounts before he left. He sold me out and ran." Garrus' eyes narrowed as he got back to his feet and moved back towards the firing range, staring out at the targets as he spoke. "His trail vanishes after he leaves Omega. But I'll keep hunting. I lost my whole team, except for Sidonis. One day I'll find him… and correct that."

"We'll get him," Shepard said, placing a sympathetic hand on the shoulderguard of the turian's armour. Garrus seemed surprised by the gesture but nodded. Shepard's comm bead beeped.

"Shepard, it's Miranda. We're coming up on the _Purgatory_."

Shepard glanced at the chrono on his wrist, then at Garrus.

"Looks like we're a few hours early." He tapped the bead in his ear. "I'll be right up."

* * *

Miranda grabbed the edge of the briefing table to steady herself as the _Normandy_ was rocked by the shockwave of one of the _Purgatory's _drive cores detonating. She wasn't a fan of Joker's cockiness or his seeming inability to take anything not related to piloting 'his' ship seriously but she had to admit his claim to having been the best helmsman in the Alliance fleet might have some merit. There weren't many helmsmen in the galaxy who could have plucked them off the disintegrating _Purgatory_ without losing a few pieces off their own ships in the process. She still couldn't understand why with all the other qualified personnel in the galaxy available for recruitment, the Illusive Man had placed the infamous Subject Zero on Shepard's list of candidates nor why Shepard had made the decision to go after her. _Maybe he figured her 'recruitment' would be the simplest. After all, it only involved dropping off payment with the Blue Suns and picking up a cryogenically frozen prisoner with no other options. _That didn't make any sense, considering their mission and Shepard's history. _No, he picked her because he thought she had a skillset we need. Subject Zero – Jack – is one of the most powerful human biotics in the galaxy, after all. But is that power worth the risk? The woman is borderline psychotic…_

The door to the briefing room hissed open, shaking her from her thoughts. Shepard walked in, accompanied by a small-statured woman with a vicious scowl on her face. _Did Shepard do something to piss her off already, or does she just always wear that expression? _Both possibilities seemed equally likely, based on her experience with Shepard thus far and what she'd read in 'Jack's' dossier. Despite the woman's slight build, there was a distinct menace about her that was as obvious as the tattoos that covered her half-naked body like a second skin. To his credit, Shepard showed about as much interest in Jack's near nudity as he showed Miranda. _That is, none at all_. Miranda pushed the thought out of her head and suppressed the annoyance that accompanied it. She cleared her throat.

"Welcome to the Normandy, Jack. I'm Miranda, Shepard's second-in-command," she said with a forced smile. Remembering how hostile Jack had been when they'd finally caught up to her on the _Purgatory_, she quickly added, "On this ship, we follow orders."

She knew immediately she'd made a mistake when Jack opened her mouth and sneered.

"Tell the Cerberus cheerleader to back off, Shepard. I'm here because of our deal."

Miranda gave Shepard a disapproving look as a nonverbal warning. As usual, he ignored it.

"Get settled in and we'll talk about getting you access later."

With anyone else, Miranda would have assumed he was just oblivious to her nonverbal signals but she knew he wasn't. It had only been a few months and already Shepard could read her even better than Jacob could, despite the latter having worked with her for years.

"Right. You might wanna hurry on that." Jack gave her a mock smile that bore an eerie resemblance to the proverbial cat eyeing a canary. "You know the damage I can do inside a frigate?"

Miranda crossed her arms and stared back at her. She'd obviously ruined any chance at forming an amiable working relationship with Jack, but that didn't mean she could allow Jack to walk all over her. _She has to know there are limits. _

"Do I need to put her in the holding cells? Just to be safe?" Miranda asked, turning to Shepard. _Hopefully Jack hasn't noticed yet that the Normandy doesn't have a brig. _Despite its greater size compared to the original, space was still at a premium on the _Normandy_ SR-2. Permanent detention facilities hadn't been included in its design.

Jack didn't respond immediately, choosing instead just to scowl at her. Miranda didn't blink. If Jack wanted to engage her in a test of wills, Miranda would gladly oblige. _You wouldn't be the first to attempt it._ Jack was the first to look away, just as Miranda knew she would.

"No thanks, precious. I'll find my own place somewhere near the bottom. I don't like through traffic." The young woman turned to leave, pausing only to let off a parting shot. "Don't keep me waiting, Shepard."

As the briefing room doors slid shut behind her, Miranda put her hands on her hips and glared at Shepard.

"Just say what you have to say."

"You're not actually going to give her access to the _Normandy_'s databanks," she stated simply. The sinking sensation in her gut told her that that was probably _exactly_ what Shepard intended to do.

"I'm not giving her access to everything. She'll only have access to the files relevant to her past," Shepard said, confirming her fear as he began to move toward the door to leave.

"There could still be sensitive information in those files, Shepard. Information that someone with a grudge against Cerberus could use," Miranda protested and inclined her body at an angle to partially block his exit. _We're having this discussion now, whether you want to or not._ "Regardless of how you feel about Cerberus, we're on the same side right now. Giving Jack a weapon to use against us doesn't help your cause either."

Shepard knitted his eyebrows momentarily, as if trying to decide whether to awkwardly attempt to squeeze past her but seemed to give up, leaning both hands against the briefing table.

"This has nothing to do with my opinion of you or your organization. I need Jack happy if she's to be a productive member of the team. What would you have done?" he asked exasperatedly.

"Not recruit her at all? Shepard, she's an uncontrollable criminal with psychopathic tendencies and antagonism towards Cerberus that borders on obsession, as evidenced by multiple, highly destructive attacks she's made on Cerberus facilities and personnel. Would you like to see the after action reports of our rapid reaction teams?" Miranda asked angrily. There was a reason a Cerberus shell company had been paying the Blue Suns such vast sums all these years to keep Subject Zero locked up tight on the _Purgatory_. _God knows I wouldn't want to have been assigned to the team that had to clean up the aftermath of Jack's last attack. _

"If I had to limit our recruiting to candidates who didn't have a problem with Cerberus, my team would consist of you, me, and Jacob. Given the scant intelligence your Illusive Man has made available on what we're facing, I need the best and Jack is one of the most powerful biotics in the galaxy – human or alien," Shepard said firmly. His tone was calm but his body language was clearly telling her he intended to end this discussion as he pushed past her toward the door. "Now, I need you to give Jack access to those files because I don't have the necessary security clearance and I'm not familiar with what's in the databanks."

"Is that an order?" Miranda asked with a final glare.

"Do I need to make it one?" Shepard asked. He sounded surprisingly tired. "Just get it done. I need to check on Jack before she rips a hole in the hull."

* * *

"How're things going down here, guys?"

"You're the best, Commander. We just got those FBA couplings installed. Now we only have to calibrate every week instead of every day," Donnelly said excitedly. "We're thinking about celebrating our newfound free time with some Skyllian-Five poker. Want to join us?"

Shepard was about to decline the offer outright, but then thought better of it.

"I'll have to take a rain check, Ken. Maybe next time," he said with a friendly smile. _Don't want to give off the impression of being too much of a straight-laced hardass. _

Ducking down below the engine deck, Shepard blinked his eyes once to adjust to the dim illumination of the storage area Jack had apparently made her home in. Jack was sitting on a cot she must have stolen from one of the escape pods, staring at a bare bulkhead as if it was the most fascinating thing she'd ever seen. _Hope she's not another brooder. _

"Hey." She didn't even look up at him. _Could be good or bad._

"The _Normandy_ has proper crew accommodations, you know, accommodations not directly situated beneath an active power core spewing enough radiation to cause you to grow a third arm."

Jack stared at him with her large, dark brown eyes for a moment, looking like she was attempting to figure out whether he was joking or not.

"It's dark, quiet, and hard to find. That spells safety to me."

"I'd have picked one of the cargo bays," Shepard said. Jack frowned and regarded him warily. Shepard shrugged and continued. "It's pretty hard to hide on this ship. The cargo bays have a lot more elbow and leg room and a lot less chance of fatal radiation poisoning in the event of an accident."

"What do you want, Shepard?"

"I need to know more about you if I'm going to integrate you into my team. The Cerberus dossier was surprisingly… uninformative." Shepard said, carefully picking his words as he began to fish for information. Jack had very little formal education or training but there was something in those eyes that told him she wasn't an idiot. Based on her dossier, what she lacked in training she more than made up for with practical experience. She probably wouldn't spill her guts immediately, but every little tidbit of information, no matter how seemingly insignificant, helped him piece together an image of who a person was. _And that image is the key to making them do what you want. _

"What's there to tell? Do you want to hear about how many people I've killed? How I can turn someone inside out with nothing but a look?" Jack asked menacingly. _She's bluffing. _Incredible as biotic abilities could be, they were still limited to telekinesis and movement of the eyes alone likely was inadequate as a physical mnemonic to fire any kind of biotic ability.

"I once killed a man by inserting a weaponized laxative into his toilet paper. Death by diarrhoea is nothing to laugh about," Shepard said with a straight face, eliciting a faint amused smile from Jack. _So she reacts to humour. I can work with that. _Jack's frequent run-ins with law enforcement and military interrogators had probably allowed her to acclimate herself with harsher, more confrontational approaches. A more relaxed approach might elicit some suspicion at first, but would likely be more effective as it'd be something she probably didn't have much experience with.

"Tell me about you and Cerberus," Shepard said, leaning back against a bulkhead and slipping a cigarette between his lips. He'd finally discovered Crewman Cho was a smoker a week ago but had been careful to avoid bumming smokes from her too often. Best that Miranda not realize how badly he'd been craving a nicotine fix.

"Cerberus raised me in a research facility. I escaped when I was a kid. Been on the run ever since. And they've been chasing me ever since. But soon, I'm going to chase them."

"Find anything useful in those files you hacked into?" Shepard asked casually. Jack looked at him in surprise but Shepard didn't meet her eyes, instead lighting his cigarette and puffing on it a few times before exhaling. Jack made a face and scrunched up her nose as the smoke slowly wafted past her, up to the deck above. Shepard noticed her discomfort and filed it away in the back of his mind for use later. Knowing what irritated people and distracted them was about as useful as a tidbit of information could get. _Didn't think cigarette smoke would bother this one. _"Didn't think I'd notice? Come on, give me some credit. You really shouldn't have bothered with the hacking."

Jack arched an eyebrow as a query.

"I didn't know you had any hacking skills before. Now I do. Miranda would have given you access eventually anyway, so it was a bit of a waste to show your cards like that."

"I got impatient. Bust someone out of prison, they'll probably try to take what they want," Jack said. "Besides, do you really think the cheerleader would have given me full access?"

Noticing Jack's growing discomfort at the smoke from his cigarette, Shepard stubbed it out. _Already figured out it pisses her off, no need to keep pushing it. _

"You might have a point there. So you come across anything interesting?"

"Lots. Your friends at Cerberus are into some nasty shit. I'm going to find something I can use, I just know it."

_Miranda will be happy to hear that. _Shepard crossed his arms.

"So what are you looking for?"

"Names, dates, places," Jack said ominously. There was a peculiar glint in her eyes as she picked up a pistol she had requisitioned from the armoury and began turning it over in her hands.

"Looking to catch up with some old friends?" Shepard asked, pretending not to notice the precarious way Jack was holding the pistol or the fact the safety wasn't on.

"I'm going hunting. Anyone who's screwed with me pays. Their associates pay. Their friends pay. The galaxy's going to be a lot emptier when I'm done."

_Yup. Miranda's going to be overjoyed. _A sliver of doubt was beginning to form in the back of his mind about his decision to recruit Jack. He'd hoped having someone like her around would be useful in the event the fragile marriage of convenience he had with Cerberus fell through, reasoning he'd have another dependable ally, but… _What if Miranda's right and I really do just have an insane psychopath on my hands?_

"The galaxy's a pretty big place. You'll be 'hunting' for a while before you make a dent."

"I've got a really long list of people stupid enough to fuck with me," Jack said, finally putting down the pistol.

"Anybody I might know?"

A sinister grin crept across Jack's lips.

"I don't know. I guess it'll be a surprise for both of us."

**A/N: For anybody wondering why I reposted this chapter, I've made a few minor edits to this chapter, fixing typos, streamlining sentences, etc. Thanks again to Atiaran, jtav, and Nightwriter for reading over and betaing my work. **


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

Miranda wiped a bead of sweat from her face with the back of her forearm as she stepped off the treadmill. It felt good to finally get out of her office and stretch her limbs. She didn't quite have the dedication soldiers like Shepard or Jacob did, both of them religiously getting up at the same time every day to work out, but she normally tried to fit a few hours in the gym into her weekly schedule. Physical exercise wasn't strictly necessary for her to stay in shape – one of the many benefits of her genetic enhancements – but she found it helped her clear her head and allow her to better focus on other tasks. _Like dealing with the aftermath of the debacle on Korlus. _

Going after the krogan scientist Okeer had been her idea. Shepard had wanted to go after more candidates to fill out his ad hoc squad. She had argued that Okeer might have valuable intel on the Collectors – intel that Mordin and Cerberus would need time to process. The renegade krogan warlord's experience with genetics and bioweapons could also aid Mordin in his efforts to develop a countermeasure against the Collectors' seeker swarms. Shepard had deferred to her judgment. Whether it was an attempt to make up for his questionable decision to recruit Jack over her objections or because genuinely bought her arguments, she wasn't sure. _I guess it doesn't matter now. _

The mission had been a disaster. They'd been ambushed by the Blue Suns as soon as their shuttle entered the atmosphere, forced to crash land far from their objective. If it hadn't been for Shepard's extensive experience in covert infiltration, they might never have made it past the Blue Suns mercenaries and cloned krogan tearing each apart to the facility Okeer was operating at – where they'd quickly discovered Okeer was even more deranged than the rumours about him had said. Worse, not only had Okeer had no useful intel to share, what little data and technology he'd gotten from the Collectors he'd thrown into one last 'perfect' prototype. They hadn't even had the chance to haul Okeer back to the _Normandy_ for a proper interrogation – he'd stupidly gotten himself killed in a foolish attempt to save his prototype. _And now we're left with nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. _The prototype, or 'paperweight' as Shepard kept referring to it, was now sitting in one of the _Normandy's _cargo bays. _Maybe one of Cerberus' scientific divisions_ _will be able to get something out of it. _Live krogan specimens were rare, the obvious reason being attempting to capture a live krogan was an excellent way to have every bone in your body broken. This one was genetically perfect – a rarity in krogan since usually the genophage caused all sorts of junk to build up in their DNA - and had been 'grown' with Collector technology. _Hopefully we'll get something we can use._

Two crewmen entered the exercise room. Miranda smiled in acknowledgment and they returned the greeting with mumbled words and awkward smiles of their own. Neither of them made eye contact. Miranda sighed inwardly as she disappeared into the women's showers. Her father's gift of physical beauty was a double-edged sword, like all the other enhancements he'd bestowed upon her. While being gifted with a face and body that could put a supermodel to shame could be a great advantage in certain situations, it also set her apart. Men were easily distracted by her looks and she could often sense the jealousy of other women. Many people of both sexes assumed she'd gotten to where she was because of her looks. She gritted her teeth as she disrobed and stepped into a shower stall. Even now there were many who believed she'd only gained her prominent position within Cerberus because the Illusive Man's tastes tended towards tall, long-legged, and curvy. _Maybe Shepard's disinterest isn't such a bad thing. _

She turned on the shower and closed her eyes for a moment, savouring the sensation of the warm water splashing over her skin, the heat acting as a salve for her aching muscles.

"_Operative Lawson_,"EDI's voice pulled her out of her too-brief escape. "_Cargo Bay 2's containment has been breached._"

It took a few seconds for Miranda to realize what EDI was talking about. _Bay 2. Where the prototype's being stored. _The bay had been sealed and an armed guard placed at the door. Only she had access… but as the _Normandy's _commanding officer, Shepard had executive override codes. _Shepard. You. Idiot._

_

* * *

_

"What happened?" Miranda demanded, narrowing her eyes as she stormed out of the lift, footsteps echoing loudly on the metal deck.

Like the two crewmen in the exercise room, Crewman Thomas was doing his best to avoid eye contact with her but for entirely different reasons.

"Commander Shepard said he was just going in to make sure the tank was properly secured, ma'am," Thomas said quickly. "Next thing I knew, he was deactivating the containment barrier."

"And you didn't try to stop him?" Miranda asked suspiciously.

"He's… Commander Shepard, ma'am," Thomas offered, as if that was an adequate defence for his stupidity.

"I left orders that no one was to be allowed into Cargo Bay 2 without my permission. Do you remember that conversation, Thomas?"

The expression on the big ex-Alliance Marine's face told her he badly wanted to be somewhere else at the moment.

"Y-yes, but…"

Ignoring Thomas, Miranda punched her access code into the console on the door but it didn't budge.

"Open this door, EDI."

"_I can't do that, Operative Lawson. Commander Shepard has disabled access through the door to Cargo Bay 2._"

"Well, re-enable it then," Miranda ordered.

"_I lack the capabilities necessary to comply with that request._"

"What do you mean you 'lack the necessary capabilities'? How did Shepard disable the door?" Miranda asked incredulously. Unless Shepard was some sort of hacking genius, there was no way he should have been able to reprogram an access code to lockout a fully-sentient AI.

"_He shorted out the servo motors in the door with an electrospanner._"

Miranda slammed her fist against the inoperative door angrily. _The bastard knew I'd stop him if he tried to access the tank. _She thought they'd agreed earlier that the risks of unleashing Okeer's 'perfect' krogan were too great for them to try opening the tank on the _Normandy_. Stabbing the intercom button to Cargo Bay 2, she pounded on the window overlooking the main cargo deck to get Shepard's attention.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, Shepard?"

Shepard appeared at the window directly across from her.

"_Checking out our latest piece of salvage._"

"It's not a 'piece of salvage', you thick-skulled idiot! It's a full grown krogan warrior that's likely already been implanted with everything it needs to know to tear you limb from limb!" Miranda shouted into the intercom.

"_Which makes it perfect to fill the heavy assault role in our little ragtag band of misfits_," Shepard answered without a hint of humour on his face. _He's actually serious. He's actually going to open the tank._

"At least wait until we can reach a secure Cerberus facility like we agreed," Miranda pleaded. _I didn't pour two years of my life into putting you back together, just to have to do it over again when an enraged krogan tears off your arms and beats you to death with them!_

"_What? And have Cerberus take him into their custody so they can cut him up and study him in another one of your twisted little experiments?_" Shepard walked over to the tank and ran his hand over its glass surface but thankfully didn't touch the controls. "_How long do you think this tank is going to hold him anyway? I've either got a potential asset on my hands or a ticking time bomb. I intend to find out which it is right now._"

"Shepard, he's a _krogan_ and he's been programmed by a madman. You have no way of knowing how he'll react once you let him out of that tank!"

"_That should liven things up around here then_," Shepard flashed her a cheeky grin. "_Wish me luck!_"

"Shepard!" Miranda pounded her palm on the glass again but he'd turned his back on her. "Damn it!"

She turned to Thomas so fast the man jumped.

"Get up to the armoury and find Jacob. Tell him to get a cutting torch down here now!"

* * *

The smirk disappeared from Shepard's face as he turned to the tank. Defying Miranda and telling her he was going to open the tank was far easier than actually doing it.

"You're a pretty big fella, aren't you?" he said under his breath. _That's an understatement. _The krogan in the tank had its eyes closed and its bulging muscles were relaxed, giving it the appearance of being asleep. Even unconscious however, Shepard felt a slight tinge of fear tugging at him when he looked at the creature. Wrex was still the biggest krogan he'd ever seen but the specimen in the tank came a close second. Unlike Wrex, its body was unmarked, free of the multitude of scars that covered the old krogan battlemaster. The heavy brow crest, covering its head from the top of its eyes to the back of the neck, was still segmented, the individual armoured plates not yet having hardened and grown together into the single impenetrable shield that gave adult krogan their distinctive tank-like appearance.

Despite presumably never having left its tank, it was clad in thick armour the likes of which Shepard had never seen on a krogan before. Most krogan warriors he'd encountered were protected by crude looking armour that looked to have been roughly cobbled together with whatever the wearer had been able to salvage or plunder. The armour this krogan was wearing looked like it had been custom fitted and appeared to have many of the same features normally found on only the newest and most expensive armoured hardsuit available in Citadel space. _How did Okeer get him in that suit? _

Taking a deep breath, Shepard placed his palm against the holographic palm reader Miranda had had fitted on the tank when they'd first brought it aboard and punched in his executive override codes. A warning klaxon began blaring as the sealed tank hissed open. The amniotic fluid the krogan was suspended in began to drain out of the tank, some of it splashing onto the deck and pooling around Shepard's feet. As the tank slid open, the krogan fell to its knees, collapsing onto the metal surface of the deck with a loud _thud_ that reverberated loudly in the cargo bay. For a moment, Shepard thought it was dead but then one of its eyes opened, darting around in bewilderment. It wretched a few times, coughing up more fluid before it seemed to notice Shepard. Its entire body seemed to tense as a baleful malice filled its eyes.

_Oh fuck me… _

_

* * *

_

"Damnit Shepard, why don't you 'hero' types ever use your heads for anything besides bludgeoning things?"

Shepard wasn't a small man but the krogan he was facing absolutely dwarfed him in every respect. Already towering over Shepard by almost a full head, it looked almost as wide at its shoulders as it was tall. It reminded her of one of the hulking reptilian monsters from Jacob's comic books brought to life. _Where the hell is Jacob and that cutting torch?_

She pounded her fist on the door one last time out of frustration as the beast rose to its full height and roared in unadulterated animalist rage. She saw Shepard begin to reach for a pistol he'd stuffed in the back of his waistband. She cringed as the krogan began its charge. _No way he gets it out before he ends up pasted against the bulkhead. _Shepard seemed to arrive at the same conclusion she did. At the last second he managed to just barely propel his body out of the path of the onrushing krogan. Rolling on his shoulder, he reached for his pistol but the krogan had already stopped and turned to charge again, its agility completely belying its size and bulk.

"I got down here as fast as I could."

Jacob grunted as he struggled to manhandle a heavy-duty cutting torch out of the lift.

"I need this door opened yesterday, Jacob," Miranda said, pressing a hand against her forehead and massaging her temples. She felt a headache coming on.

The blue flame of Jacob's cutting torch roared to life as he pulled down his protective goggles and went to work. Miranda looked away as the krogan lowered its head and prepared to charge again. _You'd better not die in there, Shepard. I'm not going back to the Illusive Man to ask for another four billion credits to restart the Lazarus Project._

"How long is this going to take?" she asked impatiently.

Jacob had barely begun working but already she could see beads of sweat pouring down his face from the intense heat of the thermite torch.

"I'm working as fast as I can, Miranda," Jacob shouted back at her over the hissing of the flame. Despite the fiery intensity of the torch, it seemed to be doing nothing except burning off the paint on the door. "These doors are meant to seal off the rest of the ship in the event of a hull breach. Getting through it's gonna take time!"

The sound of the krogan roaring again drew Miranda's attention back to the horrific scene unfolding in the cargo bay. Baring its teeth, it lowered its head and thundered toward Shepard. _I wonder if there'll even be enough left of Shepard for us to piece together this time. _Shepard had more space to react this time however and when the krogan was almost upon him he sidestepped it and stuck out his knee, clipping its leg as it passed. Somehow, the impact didn't completely shatter Shepard's knee and the krogan went airborne, smashing into a stack of heavy metal munitions crates like a wrecking ball. Miranda felt a sense of relief washing over her and she saw her emotions reflected in Shepard's face. _No way the krogan's getting up from that. _It had landed awkwardly on the back of its head. By the way it was lying amidst the pile of crates, a crumpled mass of muscle and armour, Miranda guessed it had broken its neck. As Shepard turned toward the door however, the crumpled mass of muscle and armour stirred. _Oh my god…_

The krogan pushed itself to its feet and beat both fists against its armoured breastplate like an enraged gorilla.

"I AM… KROGAN!"

As Miranda watched helplessly, the krogan picked up a crate like it weighed nothing and hurled it at Shepard's head.

* * *

The expression on Miranda's face was what saved him. As her eyes widened, Shepard instinctively ducked and barely managed to deflect the crate.

"I AM… KROGAN!"

He wasn't able to bring his arms back in to protect his body before he felt something slam into his chest, knocking the breath out of his lungs and launching him hard into a bulkhead.

"Yeah, I can see that," Shepard wheezed as he tried to stagger to his feet. His entire body felt like it was on fire. "Got any other earth-shattering revelations, big guy?"

The krogan approached, slowly and purposefully this time, like a predator cornering its wounded prey. Its bared wedge-like teeth did nothing to dissuade that comparison. _Do krogan eat their defeated enemies? _When the krogan reached out toward him with its huge three-fingered hand, Shepard tried to duck out of its grasp but pain flared in his knee and a vice-like alien hand clamped around his throat, lifting him to his feet.

"Human. Male," the krogan stated simply, as if it was reciting random trivia.

"I usually prefer 'Commander Shepard'…" A menacing sounding growl emanated from deep within the krogan's chest. Shepard locked eyes with the krogan. "But since we've gotten off to such a good start, you can just call me 'Shepard'."

The krogan just glared at him for what felt like an eternity before finally speaking again.

"Before you die, I need a name."

Shepard cocked his eyebrow. _Great. He's either deaf or brain damaged. That should make establishing a rapport easier._

"The name's Shepard, John Shepard. Like I said."

The krogan shook its massive head, a distinctly human-like gesture that somehow only made him look more alien.

"Not your name. Mine. I am trained, I know things, but the tank... Okeer couldn't implant connection. His words are hollow." The krogan scrunched up his face. "Warlord, legacy, grunt… grunt… 'Grunt' was among the last. It has no meaning. It'll do."

A self-satisfied expression spread over the krogan's face as it tightened its grip around Shepard's throat and lifted him until the tips of his toes were barely touching the ground.

"I am Grunt. If you are worthy of your command, prove your strength and try to destroy me."

"Can't we just settle this with a drinking contest or something?" Shepard asked. The krogan looked at him quizzically. _I guess humour's probably lost on this guy. _"You _want_ me to kill you?"

"Want?" Grunt looked even more confused by the word than at Shepard's attempt at a joke. "I do what I am meant to – fight and reveal the strongest. Nothing in the tank ever asked what I want. I feel nothing for Okeer's clan or his enemies. The imprint failed. Okeer has failed."

The confused expression left Grunt's face as his light blue eyes hardened. _Shit…_ Shepard slipped a hand behind back to reach for his pistol. He'd noticed a weak point in the krogan's armour, a gap underneath the shoulder plate. If he could get the pistol out, he might be able to get a shot straight through that gap into the krogan's primary heart. _That should put him down – I hope. _

* * *

"This isn't working. We need another way through this door. We could try explosives." Jacob suggested. "There should be something with enough kick in the armoury…"

Miranda shook her head. She heard the roar of the torch intensify as Jacob attempted to increase its cutting power by feeding it more fuel but it was already at its maximum setting.

"Anything powerful enough to breach this door will likely blow Shepard through the hull too."

"Then what the hell are we gonna do? Just wait here until the krogan's done and find some baggies to collect Shepard with?"

She could hear the apprehension in Jacob's voice as his words began to spill out faster. She took a step back, warily eyeing the torch he was waving around.

"Getting excited isn't going to help the situation, Jacob," Miranda admonished him. He shot her an angry look but appeared to relax.

_There's got to be a solution we haven't thought of. _An image of a biotic explosion tearing through a ship's bulkhead appeared in her head, giving her answer. _Jack!_

She'd seen Jack rip through the bulkheads of the _Purgatory_ like they were made of paper in her escape attempt. The _Normandy's _blast doors were significantly thicker but maybe if she added her strength to Jack's, they could force their way through with brute force.

"Get Jack," she ordered Jacob. He turned off the torch and looked at her with a puzzled expression.

"What for?"

"Just trust me." Jacob looked at her strangely but did as she ordered, running through the doors leading to the reactor core. Miranda studied the cargo bay door. Her biotic training had always emphasized control and finesse over raw power but she knew she wasn't lacking in the latter. If she could just focus her biotic abilities the same way Jack had, the two of them together might just be able to do it. _This might just work…_

"What the fuck you want now, cheerleader?"

Jack was looking at her with her arms crossed. Miranda gestured to the door.

"Help me break through this door."

Jack looked at her as if she'd gone insane.

"Why? What's on the other side?"

"Shepard and he's in serious trouble. We need to get him out of there," Miranda said quickly. _He might already be dead. _She pushed the thought out of her head. Jack walked over to the monitor showing the video feed of the cargo bay.

"Why the fuck would I want to help you do that? Looks like Shepard's got all he can handle." Jack smirked. "Should make for a good show. Hope he puts up some kind of fight before that krogan snaps his fucking neck."

Miranda felt a rush of static electricity wash over her skin as she turned to face Jack.

"If Shepard dies, Cerberus will no longer have need for your services. I will personally escort you out an airlock," Miranda threatened. "While we're in transit."

Jack stared angrily back at her but finally relented.

"We better fucking get started then."

Jacob's hands flared with biotic energy as he moved toward the door to help them but Miranda stopped him.

"Go up to the armoury and get those explosives."

"What about what you said before? The part about spacing Shepard?"

Miranda bit her lip.

"If this doesn't work, we'll just have to take that chance."

* * *

"Without a reason that's mine, one fight is as good as any other. Might as well start with you," the krogan said in a matter-of-fact tone as he started to crush Shepard's windpipe. Shepard's hand began to tighten around the grip of his pistol but then he stopped. _Maybe there's still a way to salvage this. Not like this situation can get any worse. _

"You might want to rethink that."

Grunt looked at him suspiciously.

"How far do you think you'll get? You might kill me. You might even be able to kill my crew. But did those tank imprints also teach you how to fly a frigate by yourself?" Shepard asked.

"What are you talking about, human? Speak plainly," Grunt growled.

"I have a proposal. You were bred to fight. I need a warrior. You need enemies. I have no shortage of enemies," Shepard said, watching the krogan's face carefully. "Join my crew and I will give you a cause to fight for."

"You think your cause and your enemies are worthy of me – of my blood?"

"You think slowly dying of starvation on a ship you can't fly is a more worthy end for you?" Shepard challenged. "I'm starting to think you're just like all of Okeer's other rejects – perfect physical specimens… but with all the brainpower of a mentally challenged varren."

A low, menacing rumble sounded from Grunt's throat but he tilted his head as if considering Shepard's proposal.

"And how are _you_ worthy to lead _me_?"

Shepard blinked. He suddenly realized how accustomed he'd grown to being able to use his reputation alone to make others listen to him. The thought had never occurred to him that he'd ever encounter someone unfamiliar with the legends that seemed to follow him like a second shadow. Shepard narrowed his eyes.

"I know war. I've been fighting nonstop for twelve years. I've prevailed over odds you can't even imagine – survived ordeals that utterly _destroyed _other men," Shepard snarled.

"You claim to be a warrior, human? Let's see you back that up with something other than words," Grunt scoffed.

"Be careful what you wish for."

_One shot at this_. Shepard rammed his fist into the soft, fleshy part of Grunt's neck between the collar of his armour and his jaw, stunning the krogan. As Grunt hand fell from his throat, Shepard put all his weight on his good leg, locked the krogan's arm, and straining his muscles to capacity, threw the krogan to the ground.

"You can either agree to follow me…" Shepard drew his pistol and pressed the muzzle between Grunt's eyes. "Or I can put you down like a crippled vorcha."

It seemed to take a moment for Grunt to realize what had happened but when he finally did, he let out a guttural laugh.

"Hah! Impressive, Shepard. Your offer is… acceptable. I'll fight for you."

Shepard holstered his pistol and extended an arm to pull the krogan up. As Grunt took his outstretched hand, Shepard was able to fully appreciate how much the krogan weighed. _How much tech did Cerberus juice me with? _

"If I find a clan, if I find what I… want, I will be honoured to eventually pit them against you. But if you're weak and choose weak enemies, I'll have to kill you," Grunt warned ominously.

Shepard walked over to the cargo bay door and ripped the electrospanner out of the opening mechanism.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Shepard said dryly.

* * *

Miranda focused yet another biotic blow against the door, trying to time the impact of the blast exactly with Jack's. She could feel her hair and clothes starting to cling to her body from the exertion but when she looked over at Jack, the other woman barely appeared to have broken a sweat. The door was beginning to buckle under their combined efforts but she was starting to regret sending Jacob back to the armoury. He wasn't nearly as strong as either her or Jack, but his added power would still have made a difference.

As she prepared another attempt, the door suddenly slid open. Miranda grabbed Jack's wrist before the other biotic could launch another warp.

"Wait!" she cried.

Shepard limped through the door with a giant smirk on his face. Miranda wasn't sure whether she wanted to laugh in relief or slap it off his face.

"Didn't think I'd be able to talk him down?" he asked, nodding at the heavily dented door as it closed behind him. Jack snorted and shook her head.

"Looks like a false alarm, princess. I'll be downstairs next time you're looking for a workout buddy," she said sarcastically, disappearing back into the bowels of the ship. As soon as she was sure the younger woman was gone, Miranda shoved her palm into Shepard's chest. The corners of his mouth tightened slightly but he managed to avoid showing any other outward signs of having felt her hit him right where the krogan had.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Miranda demanded.

"It seems to have worked out. We have a krogan on our side," Shepard said calmly, as if she'd just asked him about the weather. "I can tell you from personal experience a half ton of angry krogan can be a useful asset in certain situations."

"And if it _hadn't _worked out, what then?" Miranda glared at him, fixing her blue eyes directly on his.

"Then you'd be free of me and you could go back to whatever the hell it is Cerberus had you doing before all this," Shepard answered. Again his voice was perfectly even. The fact she was almost shouting at him and he was responding in the same tone a teacher would use on a troublesome student only infuriated her more.

"Did it ever occur to you that Cerberus brought you back – _I_ brought you back for a reason? The galaxy needs you. Humanity needs you," she said, trying to bring the volume of her voice back down but only succeeding in turning it into a hiss. "Your life doesn't just belong to you now."

Shepard recoiled as if she'd struck him. _Damnit. Probably shouldn't have worded it that way. _

"Really? And here I thought Cerberus brought me back for purely altruistic reasons," he said. His voice was completely humourless despite his words. "If you need me I'll be in the infirmary."

He limped past her into the lift and pounded his fist hard enough into the control console that she could hear it. The doors hissed shut and Miranda was left alone in the corridor. Miranda sighed. _Half step forward, three steps back. _

_

* * *

_

Lina Salassi's eyes darted rapidly around the restaurant. As usual, she was seated in one of the corner booths, her seat inclined at an angle so she could see the mirror mounted behind the bar so she could see all the entrances without _looking_ like she was watching them. Illium had plenty of far more affordable establishments with menus more suited to salarian tastes but she wasn't here for the food. Marciano's was owned and run by a human chef from Earth and its clientele consisted of mostly wealthy humans who visited it regularly. Humans being relatively rare on Illium, she could recognize most of the other patrons, making it difficult for those with potentially less-than-friendly intentions to sneak up on her.

She resisted the urge to glance down at her chrono again. It felt like an eternity since she'd last checked it but she knew it couldn't be more than a few minutes. She gulped down a mouthful of bitter tea to calm her nerves and grimaced at the taste. Under normal circumstances, she'd have gotten up and walked away already. Every client who contracted her and wanted to meet in person got the same instructions – an additional twenty percent to the total fee, they came alone, and they couldn't be even a minute late. Break the terms and she'd disappear with their deposit. The information brokering business could be deadly to those who didn't take the necessary precautions. The secrets traded were too sensitive and too valuable for any of the parties involved – buyers and sellers – not to.

This client was different though. Instead of contracting her through an intermediary, as most clients did, this time she'd been contacted directly and been offered four times her usual fee. The amount alone was large enough for her to be willing to bend some rules but the fact the client had been able to track her down was what was keeping her rooted to her seat. She needed to know how they'd tracked her down, both for curiosity's sake and so she could ensure it wouldn't happen again.

A human male walked into the bar. Lina felt her pulse quicken. Although he was well-dressed, the human looked completely out of place in the establishment, enough so that some of the other patrons glanced at him out of curiosity. Even buried under his tailored suit, his heavily muscled frame bulged through and there was a deep scar running over one of his eyes. The eye itself didn't look like a normal human eye and it took a moment for Lina to realize it was fake – a poorly disguised prosthetic that clashed with his expensive clothing.

The man scanned the room for a moment before fixing his gaze on her and walking directly toward her table. He was either the client or an assassin. She hoped it was the former but loosened the catch on her small holdout pistol just in case. _Not that it'd make much of a dent in this human._ As he neared her, Lina could make out several more painful looking scars crisscrossing his muscular neck.

The man brusquely pulled out the chair across from her and settled into it. He took off his sunglasses and let them clatter on the table. _So not an assassin. _In her many years as an information broker, Lina had been fortunate enough to avoid angering too many people but she guessed an assassin would have just walked up to her and started shooting.

"Lina Salassi?" He had a strange accent that her universal translator picked up. She wasn't very familiar with human languages, but from the accent she could tell he wasn't from Illium.

"Yes?"

"My employer wants to meet you at another location," the man said, waving the waiter over. "Get me a pint of Sullivan's Red."

The waiter nodded nervously, his eyes briefly flickering over the Blue Suns tattoo adorning the side of the man's neck before he scurried off to get the drink.

"The agreement was that I would meet your employer here, face-to-face. I'm not going anywhere," Lina said, summoning as much courage as she could and trying to keep her voice from wavering.

"Yes, you are," the man stated simply.

"You can tell your employer the deal's off. I'm leaving."

"No, you're not." The waiter returned with the beer and quickly walked away, avoiding eye contact with either her or the tattooed man. The man took a sip of the beer. "My instructions were to get you to the meeting place with my employer. Nothing was mentioned about getting you there completely unscathed."

"I'm armed," Lina warned, her hand tightening around the grip of her pistol.

"I'm wearing a kinetic barrier generator," the man said. "You'll get off one shot – two maybe – before I break all your extremities."

He tossed a key fob across the table.

"There's a car parked outside with an address programmed into the navigation console. You're going to take the car to the programmed coordinates. Someone will be there to meet you."

"And if I decide to run?" Lina asked, dreading the answer.

"I was paid very well to pass on these instructions." The man leaned in slightly, forcing Lina to look into his one good eye. "I'll be paid even better to track you down and bring you in."

Lina took the key fob and slid it into her pocket.

"I'll… I'll be there."

* * *

Miranda crinkled her nose as she walked the short distance from her quarters to the lift. After weeks of being subjected to merciless ribbing by the rest of the crew for his cooking, Gardner had begun a series of culinary experiments, utilizing combinations of everything he could find in the _Normandy's _stores. _Too bad it hasn't improved the quality of the food any. _All Gardner had succeeded in doing was turning the normal fare of the _Normandy's_ mess from 'barely edible' to 'completely inedible and possibly toxic'. Hearing Hawthorne's distinctive hyena-like laugh, she looked up in annoyance from the datapad she was trying to read. Hawthorne and Matthews were seated at one of the tables with Shepard, who had evidently just said something that the two crewmen found absolutely hilarious. Shepard looked perfectly at ease with the two Cerberus crewmen, entertaining them with war stories as if he'd known them for years.

Miranda knitted her eyebrows. Shepard may have been in overall command of the mission, but she was still the head of the Lazarus cell and thus the Cerberus personnel on the _Normandy_ supposedly all reported to her. _In theory_. Any illusion that they were 'her' staff had ended practically from the moment Shepard had stepped onto the _Normandy_. They were _his_ crew now and she was merely his executive officer, her official role as project director seemingly forgotten by everyone save herself. He seemed able to traverse the gulf that normally separated a commanding officer from his men without even appearing to try. He never had to resort to pretending to be everyone's best friend, trying to act like 'just another of the boys'. She'd encountered commanders like that before and they inevitably lost the respect of their subordinates as their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the latter resulted in a blurring of the lines separating leaders and their men. _Shepard obviously doesn't have that problem. _The crew of the _Normandy _liked him _and _respected him. They respected her too but she doubted their affection for her was anything like their affection for Shepard. _That could be a concern if we ever end up in a situation where they have to choose between their loyalty to Cerberus and their loyalty to Shepard. _

She stepped out of the lift and entered Mordin's lab. The salarian was hunched over a table, looking through an electron microscope at a number of what looked like small squares of some sort of fibre. As usual, he was talking rapidly to himself, completely engrossed in his work. Miranda cleared her throat to get his attention. Mordin looked up at her.

"Operative Lawson. How can I help?"

Miranda set her datapad on the corner of a countertop. As soon as he'd settled in, Mordin had completely rearranged everything in the _Normandy's _science lab. She couldn't even recognize it anymore. At first glance, it looked like a disaster zone, with equipment scattered everywhere and at least a dozen experiments going on, all of them at differing stages of progress. If she hadn't known better, she'd have thought there were at least five or six scientists working in the lab. Now that she'd had time to get used to Mordin's working style though, she realized that despite its appearance, there was order controlling the chaos. A very peculiar, alien kind of order, but order nonetheless. _I wonder if all salarians think like this or if it's just Mordin… _ She'd always prided herself in her ability to multitask, but the salarian scientist took the word to a whole new level. Barely sleeping even an hour a day, he always seemed to be working on something. She imagined it would be as difficult for him to work on a single project at a time as it would be for a less talented researcher to work on his dozen projects. Thanks to his extreme efficiency, Mordin was probably capable of outdoing an entire team of the most gifted human scientists.

"I… had some questions about the seeker swarm countermeasures," she said, trying not to gawk at Mordin's lab. "You've made some impressive progress, Dr. Solus, but it seems you're still quite far from coming up with a working prototype."

"Delicate work. Can't be rushed. Lives of _Normandy_ crew and outcome of mission could be threatened if all variables not accounted for," Mordin said.

"I understand, Dr. Solus. I'm just not accustomed to your approach to the problem and I don't understand the purpose of some of your experiments. Last week you requested two litres each of human and quarian sweat. Why?"

Mordin blinked a few times in confusion, as if the answer was obvious. He went over to a lab table in the corner.

"Read reports of your mission to Freedom's Progress. Needed to know why swarms didn't find quarian. Reviewed recordings and found that swarms likely aware of presence of quarian but ignored him." Mordin punched up a display on a console. "Initially thought swarms might be using species-specific pheromones to differentiate between human and quarian targets."

"That sounds like a viable theory," Miranda said. "The chemical composition of human and quarian pheromones should be different enough so as to be a possible means of telling us apart. Even the pheromones of different Earth-based species differ significantly."

Mordin scratched his cheekbone.

"Theory problematic. Quarian environmental suit would have prevented swarms from detecting pheromones. Realized that several humans on Freedom's Progress also protected by environmental suits at time of attack. Seeker swarms not tracking humans through biochemical markers." Mordin scratched his cheekbone. "Samples didn't entirely go to waste. Study of pheromones did yield results in field of aromatherapy. Discovered several chemicals not yet discovered by commercial fragrance manufacturers capable of producing adverse results in human and quarian emotional states. Could prove useful in maintaining crew morale."

"So if the Collectors aren't using biochemistry to home in on us, what _are_ they using?" Miranda asked.

Mordin's face lit up.

"Conceived of fascinating new theory last night over evening meal. If suspicions proven by experimentation, may have working prototype within one week." Mordin excitedly waved Miranda back over to the lab bench he'd been working over when she'd first entered. "Think you will find this interesting. Have to ask, how familiar are you with human physiology?"

Miranda couldn't suppress a smile.

"I supervised a project that resurrected a human being from the dead, Dr. Solus. I would say I have at least a passing familiarity with the subject."

"Ah yes, foolish question on my part," Mordin apologized. "Aware that human body produces its own weak electromagnetic field then."

Miranda frowned and crossed her arms.

"Yes, but the field is hardly significant enough to be used as a means of tracking a human. At most, it can be detected from a few metres away but even this would likely get lost in the background noise of other electromagnetic radiation."

Mordin beamed, a self-satisfied grin nearly bisecting his face.

"Yes, but fluctuation of electric impulses in human body creates unique signature in electromagnetic field. Field itself difficult to detect, fluctuations much easier if other sources of electromagnet radiation accounted for."

Uncrossing her arms, Miranda looked over some of Mordin's research data.

"But even according to your own findings, picking up such fluctuations would require extremely sensitive equipment. Cerberus attempted to create a system that could detect and track biological lifesigns based on those kinds of fluctuations but we were never able to calibrate the sensors to pick up something that subtle."

"Collectors not Cerberus, Operative Lawson. Technological capabilities unknown but believed to be highly advanced. Possible Collectors may possess such capabilities. Would explain how seeker swarms were able to detect human lifesigns through walls," Mordin retorted.

"Maybe they picked up their heat signatures and went to investigate," Miranda offered. Mordin shook his head.

"Freedom's Progress located in cold region. Average evening temperature in warm season still falls below two hundred seventy-three kelvin. Living quarters constructed with super-insulating materials. Still just a theory, but Collectors using electromagnetic signature of humans most likely answer."

"What do you need to confirm your theory?" Miranda asked.

"Will need data on exact magnitude of electromagnetic field fluctuations created by humans. More data on Collector seeker swarms also useful. Actual working specimen ideal, but not absolute requirement."

Miranda nodded. _Mordin's first request shouldn't be too difficult to satisfy but the second_ _might be a problem. _

"Cerberus is continuing to investigate new colony disappearances. I'll have the search teams keep an eye out for what you need. As for your other data, I can repurpose the _Normandy's_… surveillance system to pick up on electromagnetic readings," Miranda said, catching herself just before she mentioned the bugs she'd had planted all over the ship. After Wilson, she hadn't been willing to take any chances.

"Thank you, Operative Lawson," Mordin said. His eyes suddenly widened and he went over to a work bench and began rummaging through a box. "Meant to return these to you before."

The salarian held out the bugs she'd so painstakingly hidden in his lab.

"Disabled cheaper ones, but thought you might want more expensive surveillance devices returned."

"Oh um… thank you, Dr. Solus," Miranda managed to mumble as he dumped them in her hands.

"Call me 'Mordin'. Never saw much point in titles. Occasionally has uses, but serves only as pointless expression of self-aggrandizement when amongst working colleagues."

Miranda couldn't help but smile. She could think of at least a few people she'd worked with on the Lazarus project who'd disagree with the salarian.

"You might be right Doct – Mordin. Call me 'Miranda' then." Her omnitool beeped to indicate she'd received an urgent message. "You'll have to excuse me, Mordin. I've got a matter I have to attend to."

Mordin nodded.

"Will be here if you need me."

* * *

Miranda closed and locked the door to her office, then sat down at her console and entered her encryption key. She frowned. _Cerberus Central Command. _Cerberus cells rarely communicated with each other or with anyone other than the Illusive Man when operating in the field. Cerberus had too many enemies to risk compromising security unnecessarily. It was even stranger that she would be contacted; given the importance of the Lazarus Cell's mission and that it was based on a moving vessel.

_Transmitted: Cerberus Command_

_Intended Recipient: Operative Lawson, Lazarus Cell_

_Encryption Level: Alpha Two – EYES ONLY_

_Per the Illusive Man's instructions, your current mission remains your highest priority but we need someone to look into a situation on Lorek, a planet in the Fathar system. As your last scheduled check-in places the Normandy in the Omega Nebula, your cell is the closest operational Cerberus asset to Lorek. We have reason to believe mercenaries affiliated with the Eclipse mercenary band are holding one of our operatives in a hidden facility on the surface. This operative was in possession of sensitive data which could compromise Cerberus' capacity to operate effectively in Citadel space. _

_Fortunately, the operative was implanted with a sub-dermal transmitter which the Normandy should be able to pick up from orbit. We need you to extract the operative and recover any relevant intel Eclipse may have acquired. If extraction of the operative proves impossible, you are authorized to use whatever means you have at your disposal to eliminate the facility and any Eclipse personnel in the immediate vicinity. _

_This is a very delicate matter, Operative Lawson. We trust in your discretion._

Miranda called up the navigation display on her console. She loathed the idea of diverting the _Normandy _from its mission but there wasn't anything urgent in the mission itinerary at the moment that couldn't be postponed. Lorek was only about one day's travel away at FTL cruising speed. The _Normandy_ wouldn't even have to stop to refuel. _The problem's Shepard. _Nothing seemed to slip by the man. He wasn't going to miss his ship making a sudden detour for no apparent reason. _Not to mention he's technically in command of the ship. _Like all space-faring vessels, approval for all course changes had to go through the ship's commanding officer. Technically, as head of the Lazarus cell the crew reported to her and she could order them to change course over Shepard's objections but… _Mutiny probably wouldn't be conducive to improving Shepard's opinion of Cerberus – or me._

What she needed was an excuse for the _Normandy_ to stop in the Fathar system. Once they were in-system, she could grab Jacob and slip off the ship in a shuttle. A requisition order from Mordin caught her eye. _Two hundred kilograms of platinum. _Mordin had been using platinum as a catalyst for some of his experiments and had quickly burned through the _Normandy's _supply. She'd explain their detour as Lorek being the only nearby source of cheap platinum in the quantities Mordin needed. It might not be true, but Shepard was a soldier, not a quartermaster and thus far on this mission, he'd been more than willing to leave the logistics to her. _If I can get Shepard to dock the Normandy on the surface, I won't even have to steal a shuttle. _

"EDI, where's Shepard?" she asked, shutting down her console.

"_Commander Shepard is currently in his quarters._"

"Thank you, EDI."

Her plan wasn't perfect – she'd still have to explain why she and Jacob had disappeared for several hours on Lorek afterward – but she doubted Shepard would press her too hard. The detour wouldn't affect their primary mission. _But what if he does? _Miranda bit her lip thoughtfully. Pushing the thought out of her mind, she shut down her console and headed for the lift.


End file.
